title: Testing a discrete choice experiment including duration to value health states for large descriptive systems: addressing design and sampling issues.
abstract: There is interest in the use of discrete choice experiments that include a duration attribute (DCETTO) to generate health utility values, but questions remain on its feasibility in large health state descriptive systems. This study examines the stability of DCETTO to estimate health utility values from the five-level EQ-5D, an instrument with depicts 3125 different health states. Between January and March 2011, we administered 120 DCETTO tasks based on the five-level EQ-5D to a total of 1799 respondents in the UK (each completed 15 DCETTO tasks on-line). We compared models across different sample sizes and different total numbers of observations. We found the DCETTO coefficients were generally consistent, with high agreement between individual ordinal preferences and aggregate cardinal values. Keeping the DCE design and the total number of observations fixed, subsamples consisting of 10 tasks per respondent with an intermediate sized sample, and 15 tasks with a smaller sample provide similar results in comparison to the whole sample model. In conclusion, we find that the DCETTO is a feasible method for developing values for larger descriptive systems such as EQ-5D-5L, and find evidence supporting important design features for future valuation studies that use the DCETTO.
authors.affiliation: School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia, 2206 East Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z3, Canada; Centre for Health Evaluation and Outcome Sciences, St Paul's Hospital, Vancouver V6Z 1Y6, Canada. Electronic address: nick.bansback@ubc.ca.
authors.forename: Nick
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Bansback
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S1 4DT, UK.
authors.forename: Arne Risa
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: Hole
authors.affiliation: Health Economics and Decision Science, School of Health and Related Research, University of Sheffield, Regent Court, Sheffield S1 4DA, UK.
authors.forename: Brendan
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Mulhern
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S1 4DT, UK; Health Economics and Decision Science, School of Health and Related Research, University of Sheffield, Regent Court, Sheffield S1 4DA, UK.
authors.forename: Aki
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Tsuchiya
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D002755:Choice Behavior; D005240:Feasibility Studies; D005260:Female; D006304:Health Status; D006306:Health Surveys / Q000295:instrumentation*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D006113:United Kingdom; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Discrete choice experiment; EQ-5D-5L; Health-state valuation; UK