Monica Hernandez and Allan Wailoo attended the Spanish Health
Economics Association annual conference in May, held this year in
Bilbao. The meeting seemed slightly larger than the HESG in the UK and
there were a surprising number of British based economists there. Some
sessions were held in English, with translation, but the bulk of the
meeting was in Spanish.
Monica presented their work on how to estimate health state utility
values from clinical outcome measures (“mapping”). This uses an
example dataset from patients with rheumatoid arthritis and extends
methods first reported in their recent Value in Health publication
(Hernandez et al 2012). It shows that commonly used linear models
are inappropriate and that a bespoke mixture model approach overcomes
all of the problems of bias, poor fit and prediction outside the
feasible range that beset other methods.
The talk won the prize for best oral presentation at the meeting.
