Quality-adjusted Life Years, Utility Theory, and Healthy-years Equivalents

Decisions about medical treatments and the settings of health programs are not purely technical, but also involve issues of value such as the evaluation of trade-offs between quality of life (morbidity) and quantity of life (mortality). The most commonly used measure of outcome in such cases is the quality-adjusted life year (QALY). The authors show that QALYs, being a health status index, do not stem directly from the individual's utility …