OHE’s Devlin Co-Author on Prize-Winning EQ-5D Paper

An OHE co-authored journal article that analyses variations in hospital performance in improving patient health has been awarded the prize by EuroQol for ‘best scientific paper’ on EQ-5D published in 2013.

An OHE co-authored journal article that analyses variations in hospital performance in improving patient health has been awarded the prize by EuroQol for ‘best scientific paper’ on EQ-5D published in 2013.

Published in Medical Decision Making, the research used data on patient reported outcomes (PROMs), which includes the EQ-5D, routinely collected under the English NHS PROMs programme. The PROMs data can be used to inform a range of decisions and monitor the performance of providers of NHS-funded treatment. To date the focus has been primarily on summary scores of the detailed data provided by patients. This paper developed methods to examine hospital performance in more detail. The results showed that important variations can occur across hospitals along the five dimensions of the EQ-5D. That information is lost, however, if performance is measured only in terms of overall ‘scores’.

Knowing hospital performance on the specific aspects of health provides important information that summary scores cannot provide. It helps providers understand the links between how they deliver care and the effect on patients’ health. For example, identifying which hospitals are doing particularly well in returning patients to their usual activities after hip surgery can provide best practice examples for other hospitals.

The paper was one of two selected for a prize for scientific excellence from over 800 published on EQ-5D in peer-reviewed journals in 2013. The awards committee review was based on criteria that included methodological impact, demonstration of the usefulness of EQ-5D, potential influence on policy makers, and originality and innovation.

For additional information please contact Nancy Devlin.

Open access: Gutacker, N., Bojke, C., Daidone, S., Devlin, N. & Street, A., 2013. Hospital variation in patient-reported outcomes at the level of EQ-5D dimensions: evidence from England. Medical Decision Making, 33(6), pp. 804-818.

The research for this paper built on the collaboration between OHE and the University of York in analysing PROMs data, funded by grants from the Department of Health and the National Institute for Health Research. Other publications from that collaboration include the following.

Gutacker, N., Bojke, C., Daidone, S., Devlin, N.J., Parkin D,  Street, A., 2012. Truly inefficient or providing better quality of care? Analysing the relationship between risk-adjusted hospital costs and patients’ health outcomes. Health Economics, 22(8), pp. 931-947. (For a summary, click here.)

Street A, Gutacker N, Bojke C., Devlin N, Daidone S., 2014. Variations in outcome and costs among NHS providers for common surgical procedures: econometric analyses of routinely collected data. Health Services and Delivery Research, 2(1), pp. 1-112. (See blog post summary here.)

For a summary of OHE’s entire research programme on PROMs, which includes research on both methodology and specific policy issues, click here.