Using the Online Elicitation of Personal Utility Functions (OPUF) approach to derive a patient-based EQ-5D-5L value set: a study in 122 patients with rheumatic diseases from Germany

Objectives

Traditional preference elicitation methods, such as DCE or TTO, usually require large sample sizes. This can limit their applicability in patient populations, where recruiting enough participants can be challenging. The objective of this study was to test a new method, called the Online elicitation of Personal Utility Functions (OPUF) approach, to derive an EQ-5D-5L value set from a relatively small sample of patients with rheumatic diseases.

Methods

OPUF is a new type of online survey that implements compositional preference elicitation techniques. Central to the method are three valuation steps: (1) dimension weighting, (2) level rating, and (3) anchoring. An English demo version of the OPUF survey can be accessed at https://valorem.health/eq5d5l. From the responses, a personal EQ-5D-5L utility function can be constructed for each participant, and a group-level value set can be derived by aggregating model coefficients across participants.

Results 

A total of 122 rheumatic disease patients from Germany completed the OPUF survey. The survey was generally well received, most participants completed the survey in less than 20 minutes, and we able to derive a full EQ-5D-5L value set. The precision of mean coefficients was high, despite the small sample size.

Conclusions

Our findings demonstrate that OPUF can be used to derive an EQ-5D-5L value set from a relatively small sample of patients. Even though the method is still under development, we think that it has the potential to be a valuable preference elicitation tool and to complement traditional methods in several areas.