OHE at HESG Winter 2017: Meet the Team

The HESG Winter 2017 Conference is to be held in Birmingham from 4th to 6th January 2017. Several members of the OHE team will be attending and contributing to the conference. This post contains a summary of their activity.

The Health Economists’ Study Group (HESG) Winter 2017 Conference is to be hosted by the Health Economics Unit at the University of Birmingham, from Wednesday 4th to Friday 6th January 2017. Several members of the OHE team will be attending and contributing to the conference. We would welcome the opportunity to meet with you to discuss our research; individual contact details can be found through our Meet the Team webpage.

OHE Research being presented:

Multiple rewards: paying physicians (at least) twice for the same activity

Wednesday 4th January: 15:30 – 16:25, Session A (101)

Author: Yan Feng; Chair: Marissa Collins; Discussant: Mark Monahan

The UK Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) rewards general practices for achieving quality indicators for management of chronic conditions. Some indicators are multi-rewarded. For example, there are indicators for controlling blood pressure for patients with diabetes and for patients with chronic heart disease (CHD). Thus if a patient has both conditions the practice is rewarded twice for controlling the patient’s blood pressure. 

We compare general practice performance on multi-rewarded indicators with that on singly rewarded indicators.

We find that there is higher reported achievement, lower exception reporting, and higher quality for multi-rewarded indicators than for singly rewarded indicators. We also find that reported achievement and quality is reduced when activity ceases to be multi-rewarded.

New methods for analysing the distribution of EQ-5D observations

Thursday 5th January: 16:20 – 17:15, Session B (102)

Author: Bernarda Zamora; Chair: Jeff Round; Discussant: Nils Gutacker

This paper proposes and tests methods (Health State Density Index, Health State Density Curve and estimated Power Law functions) for characterising and summarising the distribution of self-reported health states within patient and population samples.

Using both these new methods and existing methods from information theory (e.g. Shannon’s Index), we compare the distribution of health profiles across three data sets; for the EQ-5D-5L, Cambridgeshire Community Services NHS’s electronic patient records, and for the EQ-5D-3L data from the Health Survey for England 2014 and the NHS PROMs programme.

In each case, we report the properties of each method and assess their respective merits as measures of diversity and concentration of data. We would like to discuss at this meeting the implications for the collection and interpretation of Patient Reported Outcome data in health economics applications.

OHE discussing other’s research and chairing sessions:

• Plenary session: Short to Medium-Term Priorities for the NHS

Wednesday 4th January: 18:30-19:30, (101 and 102)

Speakers and Discussants: Judith Smith, Andrew Street, Matt Sutton and Paula Lorgelly

• Own health valuation: are we asking the right question?

Thursday 5th January: 11:35-12:30, Session E (108)

Author: John Brazier; Chair: Bernarda Zamora; Discussant: Chris Sampson

• Is the EQ-5D a good fit for people at risk of developing psychosis?

Thursday 5th January: 13:45-14:40, Session B (102)

Author: Elizabeth Camacho; Chair: Chris Sampson; Discussant: Yan Feng

• The effect of hospital ownership on quality of care for nonemergency patients

Friday 6th January: 09:00-09:55, Session A (101)

Author: Giuseppe Moscelli; Chair: (Not stated); Discussant: Bernarda Zamora