Time Trade-Off Technique †

Decisions about medical treatments and the setting of health programs involve both technical and value judgments. An important one is evaluating potential tradeoffs between quality of life and length of life or between different domains of quality of life resulting from different treatment options. The time trade-off TTO) technique is one of the methods used for that purpose. Its most prominent use is in generating the preference weights to be used in the QALY (quality adjusted life years) calculation. In this section, we briefly describe the technique and its underlying assumptions. Keywords: utility; QALYs ; preference measurement; quality of life; decision analysis; cost effectiveness analysis

[1]  M Johannesson,et al.  The Ranking Properties of Healthy-Years Equivalents and Quality-Adjusted Life-Years Under Certainty and Uncertainty , 1995, International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care.

[2]  George W. Torrance,et al.  Social preferences for health states: An empirical evaluation of three measurement techniques , 1976 .

[3]  A Gafni,et al.  Evaluating health related quality of life: an indifference curve interpretation for the time trade-off technique. , 1990, Social science & medicine.

[4]  D A Redelmeier,et al.  Variability among methods to assess patients' well-being and consequent effect on a cost-effectiveness analysis. , 1992, Journal of clinical epidemiology.

[5]  Harold C. Sox,et al.  Variation in Patient Utilities for Outcomes of the Management of Chronic Stable Angina: Implications for Clinical Practice Guidelines , 1995 .

[6]  P. Dolan,et al.  The time trade-off method: results from a general population study. , 1996, Health economics.

[7]  Amiram Gafni,et al.  Risk Attitude and Time Preference in Health , 1984 .

[8]  G. Torrance.  Measurement of health state utilities for economic appraisal. , 1986, Journal of health economics.

[9]  A Gafni,et al.  Evaluation of public investment in health care. Is the risk irrelevant? , 1983, Journal of health economics.

[10]  A. Gafni,et al.  Discounting in the Economic Evaluation of Health Care Interventions , 1993, Medical care.

[11]  K C Cain,et al.  Measuring Preferences for Health States Worse than Death , 1994, Medical decision making : an international journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making.

[12]  J. de Haes,et al.  Utility Assessment in Cancer Patients , 1994, Medical decision making : an international journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making.

[13]  H. Fineberg,et al.  Preferences for Health Outcomes , 1984, Medical decision making : an international journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making.

[14]  J D Habbema,et al.  The "utility" of the Time Trade-Off method in cancer patients: feasibility and proportional Trade-Off. , 1995, Journal of clinical epidemiology.