Health outcomes constitute the basis for any form of evaluation in the context of health. For any scenario involving health assessment, it is essential to determine: which health outcomes matter and capture the essence of the problem; how these outcomes can be measured using methods that are robust, valid, reliable and replicable; and how they can be summarised to reflect their value to relevant groups (e.g. patients, caregivers, clinicians, society).

OHE has established an excellent reputation for leading innovative, ideas-driven and theoretically sound research on the measurement and valuation of outcomes. Our work on this research theme has been undertaken in countries such as the UK, Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Sweden and the United Arab Emirates. Our expertise includes:

• Measuring the impact of chronic diseases on health and wellbeing
• Understanding which treatment outcomes matter most to cancer patients
• Valuing EQ-5D health states and generating ‘value sets’
• Valuing health in children and adolescents
• Novel valuation methods, such as directly eliciting ‘personal utility functions’
• Analysing factors that affect the valuation of health states, such as age, religiosity, and experience of health problems
• Assessing the validity and responsiveness of generic and condition-specific preference-based measures of health
• The development and use of patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) for infants and young children

Key objectives for this research theme:

• Fostering outcomes-led health systems
• Increasing our understanding of patient-relevant outcomes

OHE’s policy position:

• Health care systems should put patient-relevant outcomes at the heart of decisions about funding and providing health and social care.