PURPOSE: The aim is to present the results of the PECUNIA project on harmonising methods and tools for outcome assessment in economic evaluations across countries in Europe. More specifically, the workshop addresses the challenges of cross-country measurements and valuation of outcomes using the EQ-5D as an illustrative example. 

DESCRIPTION: Challenges of cross-country measurement and valuation of outcomes in economic evaluations include the lack of national value sets for the EQ-5D, and the absence of comparability of utility values across countries. For countries that do not yet have a national value set, it is a common practice to use another country’s value set as a proxy. Currently, there exists no definitive criteria to choose from for such a proxy value set, nor it is clear how large the differences are in health state values between countries. The main difficulty is to disentangle the possible influence of national cultural values from the methodological variation of developing value sets between the national studies. With an increasing importance of healthcare policy at the European level, a pooled value set for the European region might gain significance. This workshop presents an innovative, flexible method of deriving pooled regional value sets for the EQ-5D and its application: a pan-European and supra-national value sets for the EQ-5D. While pan-European value set pools all available national value sets from the European countries, supra-national value sets combine a selection of country-specific value sets on the basis of cultural, linguistic and other considerations. The applications of both approaches are discussed. This work provides a feasible and pragmatic solution for HTA bodies when national value sets are absent and can be of help when policy-making is done at the European level, and it is useful for a wide range of audience including health policy makers, health economists, national decision makers, and clinicians.