Pan-European and Supra-National EQ-5D value sets

Within Europe, country-specific value sets for the EQ-5D instruments are increasingly being utilized for economic evaluations. These national value sets are a helpful tool for international economic evaluations as more countries are initiating partnerships to enhance the access of patients to high quality and cost-effective treatments throughout Europe. In the absence of a national value set, investigators tend to use a value set from other countries as a proxy of the national-specific value set. To address the issue of the lack of value sets in some countries and explore the heterogeneity that might stem from cultural and contextual factors, ‘Pan-European’ and ‘Supra-National’ value sets were developed by combining the existing value sets from different countries in Europe.

The Pan-European and Supra-National value sets combine utilities from valuation studies, using Time Trade-Off (TTO) techniques in the case of the EQ-5D-3L and the EQ-VT protocol for the EQ-5D-5L, from different European countries to provide means for standardizing multi-country economic evaluations. In our analysis, the linear regression model comprised both the Pan-European and Supra-National value sets. Potential use of these value sets may help diminish country-specific differences in cost-effectiveness analyses from individual countries. The EQ-5D-3L Pan-European and Supra-National value sets were created from the existing national value sets from twelve European countries (availability as of December 2022): Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain and United Kingdom. The EQ-5D-5L Supra-National value sets included national value sets from ten countries: Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Spain.

All value sets are available in the open access publications and their use is conditional upon the citation of the references below.