OBJECTIVES To recruit a panel of members of the public to provide preferences in response to the needs of economic evaluators over the course of a year. METHODS A sample of members of the UK general public was recruited in a stratified random sample from the electoral roll and familiarised with...

Background NICE is an independent organisation responsible for providing national guidance on the promotion of good health and the prevention and treatment of ill health in England and Wales. One of NICE’s main roles is to produce national guidance on the use of health technologies within the...

This paper presents a study to estimate a preference-based single index from the Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire (AQLQ). Based on the AQL-5D which is a health classification system directly derived from AQLQ, 98 health states were valued by a sample of 307 members of the UK general...

Two key questions in the context of UK health policy are: do the published preference indices for EQ-5D reflect the impact of lost earnings? Are we currently implicitly including indirect costs in our analyses? It is crucial to investigate whether or not individuals take into account any...

Ranking exercises have routinely been used as warm-up exercises within health state valuation surveys. Very little use has been made of the information obtained in this process. Instead, research has focussed upon the analysis of health state valuation data obtained using the visual analogue...

Suppose that one has a clinical dataset with only non-preference-based QOL data, and that one nevertheless would like to perform a cost/QALY analysis. This study reports on some efforts to establish a “mapping” relationship between AQLQ (a non-preference-based QOL instrument for asthma) and...

The majority of quality of life instruments are not preference-based measures and so cannot be used within cost utility analysis. The Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire (AQLQ) is one such instrument. The aim of this study was to develop a health state classification that is amenable to...

In this paper we present an alternative approach to estimating the monetary value of a QALY (MVQ), which is based upon a time trade off (TTO) exercise of income with health held constant at perfect health. We present the methods and theory underlying this experimental approach and some results...

Purpose: Health states that describe an investigated condition are a crucial component of valuation studies. The health states need to be distinct, comprehensible, and data-driven. The objective of this study was to describe a novel application of Rasch and cluster analyses in the development of...

Background: Previous methods of empirical mapping involve using regressions on patient or general population self-report data from datasets involving two or more instruments. This approach relies on overlap in the descriptive systems of the measures, but key dimensions may not be present in both...