Decision Modifiers in Economic Evaluation: The (Not-So-Simple) Case of Severity

The concept of ‘severity’ serves an important role in healthcare priority setting, being part of jurisdictional priority frameworks and functioning as a decision modifier for cost-effectiveness thresholds in countries including the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom. In this context, a decision modifier is any consideration that deviates from the premise that health outcomes—such as quality-adjusted life years—are equally weighted, irrespective of the intervention or population/disease characteristics. How to operationalize decision modifiers is an area of debate in the health economics and priority setting literature. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. What does it mean for the circumstances of one person (or one population) to be ‘more severe’ than another? And is this differential worthy of priority status when allocating scarce resources? In this seminar, I will present findings from a mixed-methods research project that sought to identify how severity is conceptualized by members of the Norwegian general public and how these viewpoints are distributed at a population level.

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Please contact Pamela Lee (pamela.lee@ubc.ca) for attendance details.