Lawrenceville, NJ, USA, April 08: Value in Health, the official journal of ISPOR The Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research, announced today the publication of an ISPOR Good Practices Report providing first-of-its-kind international guidance on quantifying the value of health outcomes in children. The report, “Valuing Child and Adolescent Health States to Derive Utilities for Use in Economic Evaluation: A Good Practices Report of an ISPOR Task Force,” was published in the April 2026 issue of Value in Health.
The Task Force team, led by co-chairs Louis Matza, Donna Rowen, and Nancy Devlin, state
“Child health state utilities can impact the outcomes of a cost-utility analysis and subsequent decisions about healthcare resource allocation. However, methods for valuing child health states and estimating child health state utilities are not as well established as those for adult health state utilities.”
The report from this Task Force, an international team including experts from academia, industry, consulting, and health technology assessment agencies, addresses that gap with recommendations on how to generate these critical values for pediatric populations. The report arrives as gene therapies, rare disease treatments, and other high-cost interventions for children accelerate to market. Therefore, the question of how we value health in children is not only a methodological concern, but also one that directly shapes whether children gain access to effective treatment.
Rather than recommending a single approach that would apply to every study, the Task Force presents 4 issues to consider when eliciting values for child health states:
- Whose preferences should be sought?
- Whose health is imagined in health states?
- Which method should be used to value health states?
- How comparable are child and adult utilities?
Based on its review of available evidence across these 4 areas, the authors reached the following conclusions:
- Researchers must be transparent about methodological choices and their impact on health state utilities.
- Methodological decisions across the first 3 issues (whose preferences, whose health is imagined, which method) cannot be made in isolation. They are interlinked and must be considered jointly.
- While specific recommendations are provided in each of these areas, the Task Force does not prescribe a single optimal approach, acknowledging that appropriate methods will vary by modeling context, health state characteristics, HTA jurisdiction, and value judgments that differ across countries.
- Call to action for policy makers: The Task Force encourages HTA bodies to carefully consider the methodological choices described in the report and provide guidance or normative judgments on these issues where appropriate.
