In: Economics
Write a minimum 500 word essay on "QALYs - quality-adjusted life years"
The quality adjusted life years mainly depends upon the generic disease burden measure which means the generic disease burden is measured over here and here it mainly includes the quality of the life lived as well as the quantity of life. For the economic evaluation QALYs is used and the medical interventions, value of money is assessed mainly by using it. Inorder to calculate the QALY ,the utility value is multiplied with the years of life and if the utility value is between one then it is perfect health and if the utility value is zero then it is dead. For example, suppose if a person lives or leads in a perfect health for almost one year then the person will be having one QALYs and if a person leads a life or he lives in a perfect health but only for half an year then QALYs will be 0.5. The new ideas as well as innovative healthcare treatments are also evaluated by using QALY and with the help of rational and explicit methodologies the optimization of resource allocation is done. In order to measure quality of life various methods exist and it mainly consist of direct methods and indirect methods. The direct method consists of visual analogical scale ,time trade off scale etc and indirect method consist of health utilities index etc.
The advantages of QALYs are the following:
The HALYs ( Health adjusted life years ) mainly includes DALYs( disability adjusted life years) and QALYs( quality adjusted life years). The disease burden is mainly quantified or measured properly with the help of quality adjusted life years or disability adjusted life years.It is very important to measure the disease burden , it is mainly done to know the health problems of a qiven population. The disease mainly cause a lot of economic loss through the mortality as well as through the treatment cost etc.QALYs is a special kind of health status index where the generic disease burden is measured.