Interpreting small differences in health utilities and incremental QALYs
NICE’s Research Team (part of the Science, Evidence and Analytics (SEA) directorate) is currently working on a Wellcome-funded research project on regulation and evaluation of digital mental health technologies (DMHTs). Through this project, we identified that DMHTs are often characterised by relatively small differences in Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) between the health technologies under consideration and their relevant comparators, which could present a challenge for economic evaluation of DMHTs.
Research question: When observed mean overall QALY and/or component parts of health related quality of life (HRQoL) differences between health interventions are small, how should these differences be interpreted?
A report will summarise all phases of the work and be submitted to NICE for review. We will discuss with NICE if the content warrants publication as a TSD but at this stage our expectation is that it would not. Upon acceptance of a final version, the report will be published on the DTSU website.
DSU Report
Interpreting small differences in health utilities and incremental QALYs
The report outlines the problem of small differences in health utilities and incremental QALYs, standard health economic methods for addressing uncertainty in economic evaluations, 9 case studies of economic evaluations with small QALY gains, and a targetted literature review of four priority areas. The report concludes with 13 recommendations that may be useful when conducting economic evaluations with small differences in health utilities and incremental QALYs based on our findings and discussions with experts in interpreting health economic analyses with small QALY gains.