Modelling and estimation of valuations for the Dutch London Handicap Scale

This paper presents a study to estimate a preference-based participation index from the Dutch London Handicap Scale (LHS) classification system that can be applied to past or future Dutch LHS data sets. A subset of 60 states were valued by a representative sample of 285 respondents of the Dutch general adult population. Different models were estimated for predicting health state valuations for all 46,656 states defined by the LHS. Several criteria were used for comparison of the different models and for arguing which one is the most preferred model to use. Our data showed that using the English index would give systematic errors for the Dutch population preferences.