Task Force Report Examines Key Methodological Choices Shaping Evidence and Decisions on Pediatric Healthcare
Lawrenceville, NJ, USA—April 7, 2026—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.
Cite This Article
Matza LS, Rowen D, Chandler F, et al. Valuing child and adolescent health states to derive utilities for use in economic evaluation: a Good Practices Report of an ISPOR Task Force. Value Health. Published online January 23, 2026. doi:10.1016/j.jval.2025.12.016.
About Health State Utilities
Health state utilities are numerical values that represent how desirable a particular state of health is on a scale where 0 equals dead and 1.0 equals perfect health. These values are used to calculate quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), the standard measure health technology assessment bodies use to evaluate whether a treatment's health benefits justify its cost. For example, a patient living 10 years in a health state valued at 0.6 accumulates 6 QALYs. A treatment that improves that value from 0.6 to 0.8 over the same period generates 2 additional QALYs. HSUs are typically derived by asking respondents to make trade-off choices about different health states. While methods for generating adult health state utilities are well established and widely used in healthcare decision making, the methods for generating health state utilities for children and adolescents have lacked comparable standardization, which is the gap addressed in this Task Force Report.
About ISPOR’s Task Force on Valuing Health-Related Quality of Life of Children & Adolescents in Economic Evaluation (Pediatric Utilities)
Objective: To develop emerging good practice recommendations for the valuation of health-related quality of life in children and adolescents for the generation of quality adjusted life years (QALYs) for use in economic models.
Rationale: Existing research in the valuation of health-related quality of life in children and adolescents is published in disparate articles and journals, with no single source that can be used as a reference point. There is a clear requirement for identifying and disseminating emerging good practice recommendations to: (1) educate and advise researchers and organizations undertaking valuation studies of the health-related quality of life of children and adolescents; and (2) assist reviewers and policy makers in their evaluations of the appropriateness of both valuation methods and child and adolescent health state utility evidence used in economic models.
Methods guidelines for economic evaluation by international agencies lack detailed guidelines specific to child health-related quality of life utilities, or they implicitly assume that what is recommended for adults is also what is most appropriate for children and adolescents. This is an important gap both for the measures of health-related quality of life that are used and how the measures have been valued. Addressing this gap in guidelines is important to advance health economics outcomes research, to increase accuracy and usage of these preference-based measures for children and adolescents.
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ABOUT ISPOR
ISPOR—The Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR), is an international, multistakeholder, nonprofit dedicated to advancing HEOR excellence to improve decision making for health globally. The Society is the leading source for scientific conferences, peer-reviewed and MEDLINE®-indexed publications, good practices guidance, education, collaboration, and tools/resources in the field.
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ABOUT VALUE IN HEALTH
Value in Health (ISSN 1098-3015) is an international, indexed journal that publishes original research and health policy articles that advance the field of health economics and outcomes research to help healthcare leaders make evidence-based decisions. The journal’s current impact factor score is 6.0 and its 5-year impact factor score is 5.7. Value in Health is ranked 5th of 124 journals in Health Policy and Services, 12th of 185 journals in Health Care Sciences & Services, and 37th of 617 journals in Economics. Value in Health is a monthly publication that circulates to more than 55,000 readers around the world.
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