OHE at ISPOR Philadelphia Part 1: MCDA, Utility Functions and Big Data

This post is the first of a two part summary of OHE’s scheduled activity at ISPOR Philadelphia 2015.

ISPOR’s 20th Annual International Meeting is scheduled for 16-20 May 2015 in Philadelphia. OHE’s Adrian Towse is ISPOR president and will be participating in several sessions. Other OHE team members will also be attending and presenting important research. This post is the first of a two part summary of OHE’s scheduled activity at ISPOR. 

Directly eliciting personal utility functions: A new way to value health-related quality of life

Koonal Shah (presenting author, OHE), Nancy Devlin (OHE), Brendan Mulhern (University of Technology Sydney) and Ben van Hout (University of Sheffield)

The end product of EQ-5D valuation studies is an algorithm describing, on average, the utility decrements associated with each dimension and level of problems within the EQ-5D descriptive system. Standard methods for eliciting health state preference data (e.g. time trade-off, discrete choice experiment) aim to ‘uncover’ these preferences by asking survey respondents to evaluate a sub-set of health states, and then using their responses to infer the relative importance of the specific dimensions and levels to them. An alternative (and novel) approach is to directly ask respondents about their own personal utility functions. This poster will describe the development of an innovative set of questions designed to directly elicit personal utility functions from members of the general public. The approach is informed by swing weighting techniques in the multi-criteria decision analysis literature and by existing direct valuation methods.