Project owner(s): UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Department of Community Medicine
Project's time span: 2013 – 2017
The project's main objective is to address the challenge of comparing health gains and disease burdens across different patient groups for prioritizing healthcare interventions. This necessitates measuring and valuing HRQoL on a comparable scale, a complex task given that different instruments and methods yield varying valuations. The project involves extensive online surveys across six countries (Australia, Canada, Norway, Germany, the UK, and the US) covering seven disease groups (arthritis, asthma, cancer, depression, diabetes, hearing problems, heart diseases) and a healthy control group. The survey participants describe and value their health states using various HRQoL instruments and express their subjective well-being through different measurement tools. The resulting dataset, comprising responses from approximately 8,000 participants, provides a rich source for examining various questions: how health state values from one instrument can be converted to values on another, ensuring comparability across different measures, and understanding the relationship between HRQoL and subjective well-being. Achievements of the project include methodological improvements in the field, providing valuable insights for decision-makers who need to compare different health interventions based on various calculation methods. The project's focus on patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) aligns with the growing emphasis on patient involvement and experiences in research.
The project was part of a large, successful international collaboration, with core funding from the Australian Health and Medical Research Council. Link to the webpage.
Publication:
- In search of a common currency: A comparison of seven EQ-5D-5L value sets. Health Econ. 2018. Link to publication.