OHE at ISOQOL 2015: Valuing Health-Related Quality of Life

This post summarises OHE’s activities at the ISOQOL 22nd Annual Conference in Vancouver, October 2015.

The 22nd Annual Conference of the International Society for Quality of Life Research (ISOQOL) took place on 21-24 October 2015 in Vancouver, Canada.

Koonal Shah attended and presented OHE’s research on a new method for valuing health-related quality of life. 

The method, which involves asking survey respondents to construct their own personal utility functions (PUFs) via a series of structured tasks, has been developed in collaboration with Professor Nancy Devlin and researchers from Pharmerit, the University of Sheffield and the University of Technology Sydney. 

The tasks draw on elements of the ‘swing weighting’ technique often used in multi-criteria decision analysis. These are combined with a novel approach to anchoring at zero, which uses each respondent’s preference data to generate individualised tasks which locate their personal ‘region of dead’ within the EQ-5D descriptive system. 

Data are currently being collected in the Netherlands and the UK, with the results of the pilot study due to be reported in 2016.

View the poster below.

In an oral session entitled ‘Health Utilities’, Koonal also presented a comparison of health state valuation data collected in England and the United Arab Emirates, drawing on the results of a recently conducted feasibility study (just published in Value in Health Regional Issues).

OHE’s research on personal utility functions is funded by the EuroQol Research Foundation. The views expressed in the ISOQOL poster do not necessarily reflect the views of the EuroQol Research Foundation.