Lisa A. Prosser, PhD

While the past 15 years has yielded key advances in valuing child health, there is still no scoring system to provide health utility scores — the numeric values that represent quality of life for economic evaluations — for children of all ages. The goal of this study is to create a health utility valuation set for the PedsQL. The PedsQL is a commonly-used pediatric quality-of-life instrument with a long tradition of use in clinical trials for pediatric interventions. A health utility scoring algorithm for this instrument will allow for economic endpoints to be estimated directly from the PedsQL without the need for additional resource-intensive data collection, providing an efficient approach to valuing health benefits for pediatric populations. Using national surveys to collect primary data on public values for pediatric health states, the resulting scoring system — the PedsUtil — will represent an important advance for measuring pediatric quality of life. The PedsUtil will ensure opportunities to incorporate health utility scores for children of all ages in health care value assessments, which will help ensure that children’s experiences with disease and treatment are accurately represented. This will allow decision makers to make informed decisions to improve health and care efficiency and address inequities.