Measuring and Valuing Health for Children

There has been significant progress in recent years in the development of instruments and methods for measuring and valuing child health. These advances are vital steps toward supporting the assessment of health technologies targeting pediatric conditions and resource allocation decisions about these technologies. However, there is a need for additional research comparing the impact of using child versus adult health-state preferences in cost-utility analyses; whether the same preference-based instruments should be used for children and adults; and the impact that different approaches to handling age transitions have when modelling over a lifetime horizon. The small number of identified studies precludes a robust discussion of the impact of spillover effects on economic evaluations, and there is currently no consensus in the literature as to best practices. Additional research is needed into the number and type of caregivers that could be included in the assessment of spillover effects and the ethical implications of including spillover in economic evaluations.