Using Patient-Reported Outcomes for Economic Evaluation: Getting the Timing Right

Abstract

Background Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are becoming increasingly popular in orthopedic surgery. Preoperative and postoperative follow-up often elicit PROMs in the form of generic quality-of-life instruments (e.g., Short Form health survey SF-12 [SF-12]) that can be used in economic evaluation to estimate quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs). However, the timing of postoperative measurement is still under debate. Objectives To explore the timing of postoperative PROMs collection and the implications for bias in QALY estimation for economic evaluation. Methods We compared the accuracy of QALY estimation on the basis of utilities derived from the SF-12 at one of 6 weeks, 3 months, ..