Historically, surgical outcomes have been measured by rates of mortality and morbidity. Fortunately, in plastic surgery, mortality is rarely an issue unless one is practicing in high-risk settings such as burn units or war zones. The improvement of presurgical morbidity, however, is very relevant to our specialty, and great effort should be made to measure it as precisely as possible. The succe...

BACKGROUND Health-state preferences can be combined with willingness-to-pay (WTP) data to calculate WTP per quality-adjusted life year (QALY). The WTP/QALY ratios provide insight into societal valuations of expenditures for medical interventions. METHODS The authors measured preferences for current health in 3 patient populations (N = 391) using standard gamble, time trade-off, visual analog ...

BACKGROUND Excessive alcohol use increases risks of chronic diseases such as coronary heart disease and several types of cancer, with associated losses of quality of life and life-years. Alcohol taxes can be considered as a public health instrument as they are known to be able to decrease alcohol consumption. In this paper, we estimate the cost-effectiveness of an alcohol tax increase for the e...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the lifelong health effects, costs, and cost-effectiveness of a quality improvement collaborative focusing on improving diabetes management in an integrated care setting. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS Economic evaluation from a healthcare perspective with lifetime horizon alongside a nonrandomized, controlled, before-after study in the Netherlands. Analyses were based on 1...

Background—In patients with severe aortic stenosis who cannot have surgery, transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) has been shown to improve survival and quality of life compared with standard therapy, but the costs and cost-effectiveness of this strategy are not yet known. Methods and Results—The PARTNER trial randomized patients with symptomatic, severe aortic stenosis who were not can...

BACKGROUND Health adjusted life years (HALYs) are used for estimating burden of disease and as outcomes in cost-effectiveness analyses of medical care and public health interventions. OBJECTIVES The impact of use of health-related quality of life (HRQL) scores associated with the disability-adjusted life year (DALY), the quality-adjusted life year (QALY), and the years of healthy life (YHL) m...