Automatic assessment of socioeconomic impact on cardiac rehabilitation.

Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) and Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs), which capture life expectancy and quality of the remaining life-years, are applied in a new method to measure socioeconomic impacts related to health. A 7-step methodology estimating the impact of health interventions based on DALYs, QALYs and functioning changes is presented. It relates the latter (1) to the EQ-5D-5L questionnaire (2) to automatically calculate the health status before and after the intervention (3). This change of status is represented as a change in quality of life when calculating QALYs gained due to the intervention (4). In order to make an economic assessment, QALYs gained are converted to DALYs averted (5). Then, by inferring the cost/DALY from the cost associated to the disability in terms of DALYs lost (6) and taking into account the cost of the action, cost savings due to the intervention are calculated (7) as an objective measure of socioeconomic impact. The methodology is implemented in Java. Cases within the framework of cardiac rehabilitation processes are analyzed and the calculations are based on 200 patients who underwent different cardiac-rehabilitation processes. Results show that these interventions result, on average, in a gain in QALYs of 0.6 and a cost savings of 8,000 €.