Introduction of Health Utilities and QALYs - 1 hour
Provide an overview of quality of life measures, differences between directly assessed and community-derived measures, the relationship between quality of life and health utility, and why we use QALYs in CEA. Examples will be drawn from recent studies of quality of life in opioids use disorder.

"An Introduction to Economic Evaluation in Substance Use Disorders" was presented by Bruce Schackman, PhD and Sean Murphy, PhD as a Workshop at the 2017 CALDAR Summer Institute held August 15 - 17 in Universal City, CA.

The course will provided an introduction to economic evaluation methods used to evaluate health care interventions, with a focus on cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) of interventions for substance use disorders. The course introduced students to concepts relevant to measurement of costs, health utilities, and quality adjusted life years (QALYs) and their use in CEA. Student will gained a basic understanding of how CEA simulation models and clinical studies are developed, analyzed and interpreted, giving them skills to understand the literature and to consider how economic evaluation could be applied to their own research.