Evaluating OPUF's Role in Health State Valuations: Strengths, Limitations, and Comparative Analysis

This article examines the Online Elicitation of Personal Utility Functions (OPUF) method as a novel approach for health state valuation. While OPUF offers a structured, modular alternative to traditional methods, it also presents notable challenges. Chief among these is its reliance on compositional trade-offs between health dimensions (e.g., pain, mobility, anxiety), which may inadequately reflect how individuals experience health holistically. Additionally, OPUF's use of numerical rating scales does not guarantee that resulting utility values exhibit interval properties-a requirement for robust interpretation in economic evaluations. To contextualize OPUF within the broader landscape of valuation methods, this article introduces a classification scheme outlining alternative approaches and their respective trade-offs in terms of precision, cognitive burden, and feasibility.