Value of hope

Compute the quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) that a patient would need to obtain to be indifferent between treatment sequences relative to a reference treatment sequence (i.e., compute the "certainty equivalent"), give differences in the distribution of QALYs.

value_of_hope(econmod, comparator, crra = 0.39, dr = 0.03)

Arguments

econmod	An economic model of class "IndivCtstm". Disease progression must have been previously simulated (i.e., $disprog_ cannot be NULL.)
comparator	The strategy_id from econmod to use as the comparator.
crra	Constant relative risk aversion parameter.
dr	Discount rate.

Value

A data.table with columns:

strategy_id

The treatment strategy ID.

comparator

Equal to 1 if the treatment strategy is the comparator and 0 otherwise.

qalys

Mean QALYs.

iqalys

Incremental mean QALYs; that is, mean QALYs relative to the comparator.

ce

The certainty equivalent.

voh

The 'value of hope'. See 'Details'.

Details

The value of hope is the difference between the certainty equivalent and differences in mean QALYs between a given treatment strategy and a comparator. That is, if \(\alpha\) is the certainty equivalent, then the value of hope for treatment strategy 2 relative to treatment strategy 1 is $$\alpha - (E[qalys_2] - E[qalys_1])$$.

See also

See the example in the tutorial.