Also found in: Acronyms.


Acronym for quality-adjusted life years, an adjustment that allows for prevalence of activity limitation.

quality adjusted life year

A parameter derived from a modification of standard life-table procedures, which is designed to take account of the quality of life as well as the duration of survival with a particular disease—e.g., cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis. QALY can also be used in assessing the outcome of healthcare procedures or services.

quality-adjusted life-years



A measure of health that combines the duration of life and its degradation by disease or death. A year in perfect health is considered to have a QALY of 1.0; a year of life in a coma is assigned a lower QALY approaching zero.
References in periodicals archive ?
In the presence of scarce resources, the QALY may help decision makers in resource allocation.
We recorded the resulting prevalence (for men and women), costs, and QALYs before and after the vaccination program.
The similarity of the patients in the two trials supports our use of the MPR [right arrow] QALY proxy derived from the RCT in the estimation of QALYs in the implementation trial.
Appendix A provides a summary of the cost per QALY in 2012 Canadian dollars of the available literature on HZ vaccination.
However, in cost-effectiveness analyses, services with incremental costs less than $50,000 per QALY are considered low-cost, $50,000 to $100,000 per QALY are considered intermediate-cost, and greater than $100,000 per QALY are considered high-cost (Fang, Minichiello, and Auerbach 2005).
These values are intended as a "threshold" such that technologies with a QALY cost above this level are not recommended for general use, and reflect the budgetary constraint under which the system operates (Buxton 2005).
940128 Strategy ICER (US$/QALY) Treat all CDR 2+ 136 CDR 3+ Dominated * Treat none Dominated * CDR 2+, Culture CDR negatives Dominated ([dagger]) CDR 3+, Culture CDR negatives Dominated ([dagger]) Culture All 127 600 CDR = clinical decision rule; US$ = United States dollars; QALY = quality-adjusted life year; ICER = incremental cost-effectiveness ratio.
62 QALY to patients' lives, according to AAOS data.
The QALY method is used to assess the value of new drugs for patients in England and Wales.
The Markov model used for the analysis estimated the discounted incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of renal denervation with the Symplicity system in US dollars per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) was $3,071--well below the recognized threshold of $50,000 QALY.
The new research found that once harms were included, the QALY benefits in terms of lives saved was only 1,500 QALYs after 20 years.