Bayesian nonparametric estimation of EQ-5D utilities for United States using the existing United Kingdom data

BACKGROUND: Valuations of health state descriptors such as EQ-5D or SF6D have been conducted in different countries. There is a scope to make use of the results in one country as informative priors to help with the analysis of a study in another, for this to enable better estimation to be obtained in the new country than analyzing its data separately. METHODS: Data from 2 EQ-5D valuation studies were analyzed using the time trade-off technique, where values for 42 health states were devised from representative samples of the UK and US populations. A Bayesian non-parametric approach has been applied to predict the health utilities of the US population, where the UK results were used as informative priors in the model to improve their estimation. RESULTS: The findings showed that employing additional information from the UK data helped in the production of US utility estimates much more precisely than would have been possible using the US study data alone. CONCLUSION: It is very plausible that this method would serve useful in countries where the conduction of large evaluation studies is not very feasible.