Healthcare experts develop new health-related quality of life instrument

Value in Health, the official journal of ISPOR- The Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research, announced today the publication of a series of articles reporting the international development of a new health-related quality of life instrument, the EQ-HWB. The series was published in the April 2022 issue of Value in Health.

The research covers key issues in the EQ-HWB development process, provides early signs regarding how the EQ-HWB compares to other instruments such as the EQ-5D-5L, and gives a useful framework to establish face validity in non-English speaking settings.

The 'Extending the QALY' project, which has inspired this body of work, began as a UK initiative driven by the need for an outcome measure for use in social and community care. The aim of the 'Extending the QALY' project was to develop a new broader generic measure of health and wellbeing for use in economic evaluation across health, social care, and public health based on the views of users and beneficiaries of these services, including informal carers."

Richard Norman, PhD, Curtin University, Perth, Australia, and Jan Abel Olsen, PhD, University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway

The introductory editorial, "Expanding the Scope of Value for Economic Evaluation: The EQ-HWB Instrument," shares some of the editors' reflections on potential improvements in the EQ-HWB descriptive system and other considerations that should be addressed if the instrument is to have broad uptake in policy, and introduces the 6 articles in the series:

1. "The EQ-HWB: Overview of the Development of a Measure of Health and Wellbeing and Key Results," by John Brazier, Tessa Peasgood, Clara Mukuria, et al
2. "Qualitative Review on Domains of Quality of Life Important for Patients, Social Care Users and Informal Carers to Inform the Development of the EQ-HWB," by Clara Mukuria, Janice Connell, Jill Carlton, et al
3. "Generation, Selection, and Face Validation of Items for a New Generic Measure of Quality of Life: The EQ-HWB," by Jill Carlton, Tessa Peasgood, Clara Mukuria, et al
4. "Developing a New Generic Health and Wellbeing Measure: Psychometric Survey Results for the EQ-HWB," by Tessa Peasgood, Clara Mukuria, John Brazier, et al
5. "A Comparison of a Preliminary Version of the EQ-HWB Short and the 5-Level Version of EQ-5D," by Andrea L. Monteiro, Maja Kuharic, and A. Simon Pickard
6. "The Development of a New International Generic Measure (EQ-HWB): Face Validity and Psychometric Stages in Argentina," by Federico Augustovski, Fernando Argento, Rocío Rodríguez, Luz Gibbons, Clara Mukuria, and Maria Belizán

"We would like to congratulate the author teams on assembling an important body of work and look forward to seeing the next stages of this research," said Drs Norman and Olsen. "We believe that the challenging valuation stage, whereby preferences are to be elicited over several extensively described health state combinations, is likely to feed back some important lessons on where to further refine and simplify the descriptive system."