Developing an Australian utility value set for MacNew-7D health states

A new preference-based measure (MacNew-7D) has recently been developed to allow condition-specific data to be used to capture the quality of life in health economic evaluations in cardiology; however, a general population value set has not yet been developed. This study developed a population utility value set for the MacNew-7D heart disease-specific instrument.

The discrete choice experiments (DCE) technique was chosen as the preference-elicitation method. The DCE asked respondents to compare two options and to state their preferences. The survey was conducted using an online panel of respondents, with quota sampling using age groups, sex and jurisdictions to achieve representativeness of the Australian population. The total design consisted of 200 choice sets, of which each respondent answered eight. Additionally, each respondent answered two quality control choice sets. The best-fitting models were selected on the basis of consistency, parsimony, and goodness of fit.

In total, 1903 respondents were included in the analyses. The MacNew-7D utility value set ranged from −0.4456 to 1.000 for health states defined by the classification system. The best-fitting model retained all levels for five dimensions and collapsed one adjacent level for the other two dimensions. Findings were robust to sensitivity analyses related to the inclusion or exclusion of dominancy and repeat tasks.

Findings indicated that the MacNew-7D utility value set is likely suitable for estimating quality-adjusted life years derived from the MacNew heart disease health-related quality–of-life questionnaire. This value set was derived from an Australian population-based sample and may not be generalisable to dissimilar populations.