Measurement and Valuation of Health for Economic Evaluation

This article provides an overview of the current state of the art in the measurement and valuation of health for economic evaluation. We consider the fundamental issues that have been, and continue to be, debated in the literature including how to describe health, what mechanisms should be used to value health, and who should do the valuing (e.g., patients or members of the general population). The main techniques for the direct valuation of health states are then described including the conventional cardinal techniques and ordinal methods that are starting to be used to value health states. The relative advantages and disadvantages of each technique are discussed. The article concludes with a brief review of the most widely used generic preference-based measures of health including EQ-5D, SF-6D, and the HUI3.