Application and significance of willingness-to-pay in measuring the burden of skin diseases / 中华皮肤科杂志

ABSTRACT

According to the new biopsychosocial medical model,status and burden of diseases should be evaluated comprehensively,and health-related quality of life can be an important measurement index of the burden of diseases.Conventional assessment methods for health-related quality of life include interval-based assessment methods and preference-based assessment methods (health utilities and willingness-to-pay).This review introduces willingness-to-pay,and summarizes its applications in skin diseases.However,at present,only a small quantity of small-scale studies are available on willingness-to-pay,with only a few kinds of skin diseases involved.In the application of health-economic assessment of skin diseases,willingness-to-pay can serve as an approximate index of benefit gains,and be more valuable in practice than health utilities (the index of utility gains).With the increase in health-economic researches on skin diseases,more attention is paid to the willingness-to-pay for skin diseases and other health-economic assessment methods,and large-scale health-economic assessment-related researches are expected to be conducted on more kinds of skin diseases.