European Health Economics Association (EuHEA) Conference - Sep 2014

Bryan Coughlan presented his work at the first European Health Economics Association (EuHEA) PhD Student-supervisor and Early Career Researcher (ECR) conference from 1st-3rd September 2014, Manchester. Attending the conference was Bryan’s supervisor, Anne Spencer. Anne discussed and chaired a number of presentations and felt that the quality of submissions were high. Bryan’s presentation was well attended and Bryan received good feedback from Professor Catherine Payne, the discussant of his paper.

Anne Spencer’s research into the use of Discrete Choice Experiments (DCEs) to derive health state utilities for use in QALY will be forthcoming in Medical Decision Making. The research is in collaboration with colleagues from the Medical School and School of Economics at the University of East Anglia.

The motivation for this research lies in the well- known problems that exist with more traditional value elicitation techniques such as Standard Gamble (SG) and Time Trade Off (TTO) but there remains uncertainty about how best to apply the DCEs to value QALYs. The research looks at decision making under risk and sets out to estimate alternative models of risky choice within a DCE model. At this stage of the research it is not possible assess which approach is ‘superior’, but this research goes some way towards setting out the potential strengths and weaknesses of the competing elicitation procedures. Setting out valid arguments is a small, but important, step, as certain arguments that have been put forward previously are not valid. “A framework for estimating health state utility values within a discrete choice experiment: Modelling risky choices”, Angela Robinson, Anne Spencer & Peter Moffatt. forthcoming Medical Decision Making, 2014.

Date: 30 September 2014