The updated Vitality Age Calculator (VA.3) is an online tool giving users a snapshot of their overall health based on lifestyle choices and clinical risk factors by comparing the individual life expectancy to the average population. Healthy Vitality Age, an extension of VA.3, uses the Health Adjusted Life Expectancy to account for both mortality and morbidity while adjusting the life expectancy by the amount of time lived in suboptimal health.

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Healthy Vitality Age

by Sunil Patil, Christian Van Stolk, Cloé Gendronneau, Martin Stepanek, Francois Millard, Howard Bolnick

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Research Questions

  1. What would be a good approach to include a measure of quality of life to the VA.3 computation?
  2. What data source could be used to compute the Healthy Vitality Age?
  3. What would be the potential limitations of the Healthy Vitality Age?

The updated Vitality Age Calculator (VA.3) is an online tool that gives users a snapshot of their overall health based on lifestyle choices and clinical risk factors. While VA.3 compares the individual life expectancy (remaining years of life) to the average population life expectancy, this extension of the calculator, called Healthy Vitality Age, uses the concept of Health Adjusted Life Expectancy (HALE). HALE takes into account both mortality and morbidity by adjusting the life expectancy by the amount of time lived in less than perfect health. A Healthy Vitality Age higher than an actual age signals a lower-than-average number of years of healthy life remaining, with the difference between Healthy Vitality Age and actual age being equal to the estimated change in health adjusted life expectancy. This report documents the methodology of the Healthy Vitality Age extension to the VA.3 model and its limitations.

Key Findings

  • The Healthy Vitality Age uses a similar methodology as VA.3 and compares individual Health Adjusted Life Expectancy (HALE) to the average population HALE.
  • To supplement the data used by VA.3, data from the Global Burden of Diseases on years lived with disabilities, prevalence rates and disability weights are used in HVA.
  • More research would be needed on the variance in disability weights for the same outcome across individuals.

Table of Contents

  • Chapter One

    Introduction

  • Chapter Two

    Methodology

  • Chapter Three

    Data

  • Chapter Four

    Validation and Testing of HVA model

  • Chapter Five

    Limitations

Research conducted by

This research was funded by the Discovery group of companies, part of Discovery Limited and conducted by RAND Europe.

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