‘A re-estimation of the EuroQol-5D system for assessing health status. Implication for the economic evaluation of healthcare technologies’

Eva Mª Rodríguez Míguez, Fernando Ignacio Sánchez Martínez, Ildefonso Méndez Martínez, Jorge Eduardo Martínez Pérez.

Cost-utility analyses offer many advantages for the economic evaluation of new healthcare technologies, though they require the drawing-up of utility indices representing individual preferences between alternative states of health. One of the most widely used techniques for calculating such utility is the EuroQol-5D system. The EuroQol-5D generates utilities or ?tariffs? for 243 different states of health, based on an econometric model worked out from a subset of direct valuations. A serious shortcoming is that the tariffs now in use rest on the assumptions that the utility of life expectancy is linear, and that the theory of expected utility gives an accurate description of individual preferences.

The aim of this project is to obtain new estimates that overcome these limitations. This will be done by building a new model based on the non linearity of the life expectancy utility function, and on the paradigm of the order-dependent utility theory, capable of delivering EQ-5D tariffs with greater descriptive power.