Comparison of valuation methods of health states societal preferences

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the equivalence between three valuation methods for eliciting health states preferences: Ranking, Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and Time Trade-off (TTO). Preferences are used in health technology assessment. Data come from a survey in Minas Gerais using the EQ-5D descriptive system. The transformation of ordinal preferences into cardinal preferences was performed using the conditional logit model. The results show that despite the ranking of preferences to be similar among the three methods, significant differences in values are observed and play important consequences for making decision regarding allocation of health resources.