Objectives To assess whether recently-proposed alternatives to the quality-adjusted life year (QALY), intended to address concerns about discrimination, are suitable for informing resource allocation decisions. Methods We consider two alternatives to the QALY: the Health Years in Total (HYT), recently proposed by Basu et al., and the Equal Value of Life Years Gained (evLYG),…
| Carmel Montgomery, Colleen M. Norris, Darryl B. Rolfson, Henry Stelfox, Mohamad A. Zibdawi, Sean Bagshaw, Thanh Nguyen, Steven R. Meyer
There is limited information about the impact of frailty on public payer costs in cardiac surgery. This study aimed to determine quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) and costs associated with pre-operative frailty in patients referred for cardiac surgery.
Overconsumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) contributes to childhood and adult obesity and numerous related diseases, including heart disease, strokes, cancers, and type 2 diabetes. It also increases healthcare costs. Sugary drink taxes have been implemented in several countries to curb sugar intake. However, there is a concern that sugary drink taxes are regressive. This…
| Safoura Moeeni
I examine the effects of education on the labor force participation (LFP) of married women in an intra-household collective decision framework with imperfectly transferable utility and endogenous bargaining powers. In this case, individuals’ pre-marriage choices, including educational choices and matching on the marriage market, determine their bargaining power. Education…
Health Technology Assessment (HTA) has always sought to incorporate the evidence of all patients affected in the decision-making process. While health system budgets could increase to cover costs of new technologies, the relevant patients are those benefitting from access to the technology being appraised. More recently, with health system budgets effectively fixed, costs of new…
OBJECTIVES: To examine the resource use and healthcare costs for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in Alberta, Canada between 2008 and 2016 and model the future costs to 2030.
Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) is a preventable disorder caused by maternal alcohol consumption and marked by a range of physical and mental disabilities. Although recognized by the scientific and medical community as a clinical disorder, no internationally standardized diagnostic tool yet exists for FASD.
Little is known about resource use and cost burden of Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI) beyond the index event. We examined resource use and care costs during the first and each subsequent year, among patients with incident AMI.
Using sources ranging from the biblical Book of Judges (pre-1700) up until the first public health bulletin (1977), we seek to provide an overview of the academic debate around early historical accounts ostensibly attributed to the awareness of alcohol as a prenatal teratogen as well as to describe the social and political influences that sculpted developments leading to the public…
Little is known about the cost burden of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) on healthcare systems. Accordingly, we examined the long-term trends of healthcare costs for AMI in the province of Alberta, Canada.
The recently released Canadian cardiac care quality indicators include 30-day in-hospital mortality and readmission rates after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and isolated coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG). We examined long-term trends and provincial variations in these outcomes among acute myocardial infarction (AMI) patients.
In pharmaceutical clinical trials, industrial sponsors pay for study drugs and related healthcare services. We conducted a study to determine industry’s economic contribution of these trials to the Alberta healthcare system.
In the nurse-led care (NLC) model, nurses take on the primary responsibility for patient management. We systematically assessed the effect of NLC for patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) on multiple dimensions of quality of care from the Alberta Quality of Care Matrix for Health.
A patient research internship (Patient and Community Engagement Research program-PaCER) was created to support a provincial commitment by Alberta Health Services' Strategic Clinical Networks™ to find new ways to engage patients in a new interdisciplinary organization to support evidence-informed improvements in clinical outcomes across the health system.
Middle-aged individuals classified as normal by BMI may be overweight/obese based on measures of %BF. These individuals may be at risk for chronic diseases, but would not be identified as such based on their BMI classification. Quantifying %BF in this group could inform targeted strategies for disease prevention.
| Deborah Marshall, Karen MacDonald, Jill Oliver Robinson, Lisa Barcellos, Milena Gianfrancesco, Monica Helm, Amy McGuire, Robert Green, Michael Douglas, Michael Goldman, Kathryn Phillips
Since whole-genome sequencing (WGS) information can have positive and negative personal utility for individuals, we examined predictors of willingness to pay (WTP) for WGS. Patients & methods: We surveyed two independent populations: adult patients (n = 203) and college seniors (n = 980). Ordinal logistic regression models were used to characterize the relationship between…
The growth of "big data" and the emphasis on patient-centered health care have led to the increasing use of two key technologies: personalized medicine and digital medicine. For these technologies to move into mainstream health care and be reimbursed by insurers, it will be essential to have evidence that their benefits provide reasonable value relative to their costs. These technologies,…
We examine key study design challenges of using stated-preference methods to estimate the value of whole-genome sequencing (WGS) as a specific example of genomic testing. Assessing the value of WGS is complex because WGS provides multiple findings, some of which can be incidental in nature and unrelated to the specific health concerns that motivated the test. In addition, WGS results…
Eplerenone has been demonstrated as being cost effective for the treatment of patients with systolic heart failure (HF) and mild symptoms in several jurisdictions; however, its cost effectiveness is unknown in the context of Alberta, Canada.