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COVID-19-related health utility values and changes in COVID-19 patients and the general population: a scoping review

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Abstract

Purpose

To summarise the diverse literature reporting the impact of COVID-19 on health utility in COVID-19 patients as well as in general populations being affected by COVID-19 control policies.

Methods

A literature search up to April 2023 was conducted to identify papers reporting health utility in COVID-19 patients or in COVID-19-affected general populations. We present a narrative synthesis of the health utility values/losses of the retained studies to show the mean health utility values/losses with 95% confidence intervals. Mean utility values/losses for categories defined by medical attendance and data collection time were calculated using random-effects models.

Results

In total, 98 studies—68 studies on COVID-19 patients and 30 studies on general populations—were retained for detailed review. Mean (95% CI) health utility values were 0.83 (0.81, 0.86), 0.78 (0.73, 0.83), 0.82 (0.78, 0.86) and 0.71 (0.65, 0.78) for general populations, non-hospitalised, hospitalised and ICU patients, respectively, irrespective of the data collection time. Mean utility losses in patients and general populations ranged from 0.03 to 0.34 and from 0.02 to 0.18, respectively.

Conclusions

This scoping review provides a summary of the health utility impact of COVID-19 and COVID-19 control policies. COVID-19-affected populations were reported to have poor health utility, while a high degree of heterogeneity was observed across studies. Population- and/or country-specific health utility is recommended for use in future economic evaluation on COVID-19-related interventions.

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Data availability

Data for this study are available upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Ms Barbara Lejeune, of the University of Antwerp Library services, for assistance in developing and implementing the search strategy.

Funding

This work was co-funded by the Epipose (101003688) and ESCAPE (101095619) projects, of the European Union Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe research and innovation programme. MJ acknowledges funding by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee (grant number 10051037) and the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Modelling and Health Economics, a partnership between the UKHSA, Imperial College London and LSHTM (grant code NIHR200908). Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HADEA), NIHR, UKHSA or DHSC. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Health Economics Research and Modelling Infectious Diseases (CHERMID), University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

    Zhuxin Mao, Xiao Li & Philippe Beutels

  2. Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Faculty of Epidemiology and Population Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK

    Mark Jit

  3. Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK

    Mark Jit

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Contributions

This study was conceived and supervised by PB. Systematic literature search and data curation were conducted by ZM and XL, in consultation with PB. Data analyses and visualisation were conducted by ZM, in consultation with XL, MJ and PB. The first draft of the manuscript was written by ZM. All authors critically reviewed the manuscript and provided final approval of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Zhuxin Mao.

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Conflict of interest

PB report grants from the European commission public–private IMI projects RESCEU and PROMISE and grants from Pfizer and Merck, all outside of the current work. All other authors report no potential conflicts of interest.

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Mao, Z., Li, X., Jit, M. et al. COVID-19-related health utility values and changes in COVID-19 patients and the general population: a scoping review. Qual Life Res 33, 1443–1454 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11136-023-03584-x

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