International Valuation Protocol for the EQ-5D-Y-3L

• Published in: PharmacoEconomics Vol. 38; no. 7; pp. 653 - 663
• Main Authors: Ramos-Goñi, Juan M., Oppe, Mark, Stolk, Elly, Shah, Koonal, Kreimeier, Simone, Rivero-Arias, Oliver, Devlin, Nancy
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 01-07-2020; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Analysis; Children & youth; Evaluation; Health Administration; Health Economics; Health technology assessment; Medical protocols; Medicine; Medicine & Public Health; Methods; Pharmacoeconomics and Health Outcomes; Pilot projects; Practical Application; Preferences; Public Health; Quality of life; Quality of Life Research; Studies; Valuation methods; Spain; United States > US
• ISSN: 1170-7690; 1179-2027
• DOI: 10.1007/s40273-020-00909-3

The EQ-5D-Y-3L is a generic, health-related, quality-of-life instrument for use in younger populations. Some methodological studies have explored the valuation of children’s EQ-5D-Y-3L health states. There are currently no published value sets available for the EQ-5D-Y-3L that are appropriate for use in a cost-utility analysis. The aim of this article was to describe the development of the valuation protocol for the EQ-5D-Y-3L instrument. There were several research questions that needed to be answered to develop a valuation protocol for EQ-5D-Y-3L health states. Most important of these were: (1) Do we need to obtain separate values for the EQ-5D-Y-3L, or can we use the ones from the EQ-5D-3L? (2) Whose values should we elicit: children or adults? (3) Which valuation methods should be used to obtain values for child’s health states that are anchored in Full health = 1 and Dead = 0? The EuroQol Research Foundation has pursued a research programme to provide insight into these questions. In this article, we summarized the results of the research programme concluding with the description of the features of the EQ-5D-Y-3L valuation protocol. The tasks included in the protocol for valuing EQ-5D-Y-3L health states are discrete choice experiments for obtaining the relative importance of dimensions/levels and composite time-trade-off for anchoring the discrete choice experiment values on 1 = Full Health and 0 = Dead. This protocol is now available for use by research teams to generate EQ-5D-Y-3L value sets for their countries allowing the implementation of a cost-utility analysis for younger populations.