Two Companion Studies in Value in Health Deliver Both the New UK EQ-5D-5L Value Set and a Roadmap for What Changes Next

Lawrenceville, NJ, USA—May 27, 2026—Value in Health, the official journal of ISPOR—The Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research, announced today the publication of a pair of companion articles that together establish both the methodological foundation of the first definitive UK value set for the EQ-5D-5L and the practical implications of adopting it—thus equipping health technology assessment decision makers with a UK value set suitable for informing policy. The articles were featured in the May 2026 issue of Value in Health.

In their landmark paper, "A United Kingdom Value Set for the EQ-5D-5L," Donna Rowen, PhD, and colleagues present a new EQ-5D-5L UK value set, which was generated from preference data elicited with a representative sample of the UK public. "A UK EQ-5D-5L value set is needed to enable the latest version of EQ-5D to inform policy, including evidence submitted to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) as part of health technology appraisals," said Rowen, Sheffield Centre for Health and Related Research, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom.

Heretofore, without an accepted UK value set for the EQ-5D-5L, health technology assessors have relied on a workaround—mapping EQ-5D-5L responses back onto the UK EQ-5D-3L value set, a scoring system rooted in 1990s data that may no longer reflect current public preferences. Beyond its age, the 3L value set predates significant advances in preference elicitation methods, and estimating health state values by indirect mapping from a different instrument is recognized as methodologically inferior to direct estimation using a value set for the instrument. The study by Rowen et al closes that gap. NICE has stated its plans to adopt the new value set, and its adoption is currently out for public consultation.

The second companion article, “Switching From EQ-5D-3L to EQ-5D-5L in England: The Impact in NICE Technology Appraisals,” by Aline Navega Biz, PhD, and colleagues at the University of Sheffield, addresses a practical question that policy makers and the pharmaceutical industry will immediately want answered: What actually changes when the new value set is adopted? To find out, the researchers applied the new 5L value set retrospectively to 39 NICE technology appraisal decisions published between 2016 and 2024, modeling what the cost-effectiveness results would have looked like had the new value set been in use at the time.

The findings reveal that the impact is substantial—and uneven. For oncology therapies, the switch to 5L improved cost-effectiveness outcomes on average, increasing incremental quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) by 12.5%. The opposite effect appeared for non-oncology therapies that improve quality of life without extending survival, where incremental QALYs decreased by 37.5%. The changes to ICERs were in the opposite direction of the observed change in incremental QALYs in each group. As the authors put it: "The new 5L value set has implications that favor some types of technologies (such as oncological pharmaceuticals) and disadvantages others (such as quality of life-only improving therapies). Health technology assessment bodies such as NICE need to consider the impact of these implications."

Together, these companion articles arrive at a pivotal moment. With NICE proposing to adopt the new value set, the field moves from anticipation to implementation. The Rowen et al value set provides the methodological foundation the United Kingdom has long needed, and the Biz et al analysis equips decision makers, manufacturers, and payers with the foresight to understand what that transition means in practice.

ABOUT THE EQ-5D-5L
EQ-5D-5L is a standardized, self-reported instrument for measuring health-related quality of life (HRQoL), developed by the EuroQol Group. It captures a person's health status across 5 dimensions: mobility, self-care, usual activities, pain/discomfort, and anxiety/depression. Each dimension has 5 response level options: no problems, slight problems, some problems, severe problems, extreme problems/unable to do. (This distinguishes it from the older EQ-5D-3L, which had only 3 levels per dimension: no problems, some problems, extreme problems.) This scoring process yields a 5-digit health state profile—for example, "11111" represents full health and "55555" the worst possible state across all dimensions.

The value set is the scoring table that converts that 5-digit profile into a single utility score anchored at 1 (full health) and 0 (equivalent to death). It does this by assigning a decrement for each level of each dimension below full health, based on preferences elicited from a representative sample of the general public. Those utility scores feed directly into quality-adjusted life year calculations—the standard unit of health benefit in cost-effectiveness analysis—which is why the choice of value set has real consequences for which treatments are deemed cost-effective by bodies like NICE.

See more on the EuroQol instruments at EuroQol.org.

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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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