Just Published: Testing the Feasibility of Obtaining EQ-5D-5L Values in the United Arab Emirates

This study tests the feasibility of eliciting EQ-5D-5L values from a general public sample in the United Arab Emirates.

Recently published in Value in Health Regional Issues is a study examining the feasibility and cultural appropriateness of using stated preference methods to elicit EQ-5D-5L values from a general public sample in the United Arab Emirates. 

The research was undertaken by OHE’s Koonal Shah and Professor Nancy Devlin in collaboration with the United Arab Emirates University and Eli Lilly & Company. Initial findings were presented at the 6th ISPOR Asia-Pacific Congress and reported in this blog in September 2014.

Stated preference data were collected from 200 adult Emiratis in December 2013. An Arabic version of the EuroQol Group’s computer-based questionnaire was developed (see Figure 1). This involved reversing the presentation of information to reflect the fact that Arabic is written and read from right to left.

Figure 1. Screenshot from Arabic version of the questionnaire

Source: EuroQol Group Valuation Technology

The results suggest that it is feasible to generate meaningful EQ-5D-5L values in the United Arab Emirates. However, the authors note that some adaptation of the methods may be required to improve their acceptability. 

The findings of this study will inform further research to generate ‘value sets’ for patient-reported outcome instruments to enable local preferences to be used in health technology appraisal. 

Reference: Papadimitropoulos, M., ElBarazi, I., Blair, I., Katsaiti, M.S., Shah, K.K. and Devlin, N., 2015. An investigation of the feasibility and cultural appropriateness of stated preference methods to generate health state values in the United Arab Emirates. Value in Health Regional Issues, 7C, pp.34-41.

Access the paper here.

Click here to read the ISPOR Press Release.

OHE has been involved in a number of recently published journal articles which report the findings of health state valuation research. These include: 

• a paper in Medical Care [open access] which reports a study investigating the feasibility of using discrete choice experiments to value EQ-5D-5L health states 
• a paper in the European Journal of Health Economics [open access] comparing two settings for administering computer-assisted time trade-off (TTO) tasks 
• a paper in Health Economics investigating alternative variants of the ‘lead time’ and ‘lag time’ TTO valuation techniques

For more information on OHE’s research in this area, please contact Koonal Shah or Nancy Devlin.