A Dutch tariff for the EQ-5D-5L

Currently, the EQ-5D is the most commonly used instrument instruments for measuring health related quality of life for the estimation of quality adjusted life years within (pharmaco)economic evaluations. Nevertheless, users have expressed worries about its crude level structure that restricts its potential to detect small differences in health and to evaluate health of patients with mild conditions. To improve the discriminatory potential of the EQ-5D, a new version of the EQ-5D has been developed which increases the number of answer levels per dimension from 3 to 5. Accordingly, the number of health states is increased from 243 to 3125. This new instrument is known as the EQ-5D-5L. To make the EQ-5D-5L suitable for use in pharmacoeconomic evaluations, as a subsequent step social values need to be attached to all 3125 health states. The current proposal will provide these Dutch values, using the latest developments in valuation methodology and in accordance with the EuroQol group’s guidelines for EQ-5D-5L valuation studies. Values for the EQ-5D-5L will be elicited from a general population sample (N=750). The sample will be recruited using proportionate stratified sampling, so that the sample reflects diversity in the general population for age, sex, and level of education. The sample will include people from different ethnic backgrounds and from different areas in the Netherlands, to ensure that potential ethnic and regional differences will be reflected. Each of the participating HTA centers will collect equal shares of the responses. The respondents will be asked to value a subset of the EQ-5D-5L health states using lead time TTO (LT-TTO) and discrete choice (DC) modeling. Both tasks will be administered using a computer-based application that has been developed for this purpose by the EuroQol group, and that has been tested extensively. The tasks will be administered in presence of an interviewer as recommended in the protocol. Regression analysis will be applied to the valuations obtained for the subset of health states. By means of the estimated regression coefficients, which together constitute the so-called Dutch tariff, valuations can be determined for all possible EQ-5D health states.