Study published by researchers from the University of Lisbon (prof. Monica Oliveira, Carlos Bana and collaborators) makes an important contribution to the discussion of how to extract preferences from the Euroqol questionnaire.

Background: Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALY) is an outcome measure widely used in the assessment of health technologies

Methods: A new protocol for extracting preferences (utilities) based on MACBETH was developed and tested within a web research format. A sample of the Portuguese general population (n = 243) valued 25 EQ-5D-3L health states with the MACBETH protocol and with a variant of the trade-off protocol

Results: The results show that the mean values derived from MACBETH and the TTO variant are strongly correlated; However, there are substantial differences in the values of various states of health.

Conclusion: The results suggest that it is worth investigating or using non-numerical preference extraction methods.

Available in https://hqlo.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12955-018-1056-y