Cost-Effectiveness Analysis Flashcards
7 cards from real HAC practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Cost-Effectiveness Analysis flashcards as text
The 'value of information' (VOI) analysis in CEA is used to:
Answer: Estimate how much uncertainty in model parameters is worth reducing through additional research
VOI quantifies the economic value of reducing decision uncertainty, guiding whether further research is worth its cost.
In a CEA using a Markov model, 'absorbing states' are health states that:
Answer: Patients can enter but never leave, such as death
Absorbing states like death have a self-loop probability of 1.0 — once entered, patients remain there permanently.
Which of the following best describes 'threshold analysis' in CEA?
Answer: Identifying the value of a parameter at which the decision changes (e.g., ICER crosses WTP threshold)
Threshold analysis determines what value a key parameter must take for the study conclusion (cost-effective vs. not) to reverse.
Cost-utility analysis (CUA) is a subset of CEA that specifically uses which outcome unit?
Answer: Quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs)
CUA is the most common form of CEA in healthcare and always uses QALYs as the effectiveness measure to enable cross-condition comparisons.
Which of the following is a key limitation of using DALYs compared to QALYs in a US healthcare CEA?
Answer: DALYs measure burden of disease rather than individual treatment benefit, making them less suited for payer-level decisions
DALYs are population-level burden metrics used in global health, whereas QALYs better reflect individual treatment benefit preferred by US payers.
Indirect costs in a societal-perspective CEA are best estimated using which method?
Answer: Friction cost method or human capital approach applied to productivity losses
The human capital approach values lost productivity by wages and work-hours lost, while the friction cost method limits this to the time needed to replace the worker.
Which ICER outcome quadrant on the cost-effectiveness plane always requires a value judgment using a WTP threshold?
Answer: Higher cost, greater effectiveness (north-east quadrant)
In the north-east quadrant, the intervention costs more but is more effective, so a WTP threshold is needed to decide if the extra benefit is worth the extra cost.