Tool development in health care research

Measures of Population Health would need to be compatible across nations and cultures to serve as measures for making global health policy. Health state valuations on the basis of utility instruments such as rating scales, ex. the Visual Analog Scale or methods such as personal trade-off, time trade-offand standard gamble, are one of the critical inputs that contribute to the calcula-tion of summary measures of population health. These methods are supposed to assess an individual's valuation of hypothetical health states in terms of a single number indicating the value placed on a health state relative to perfect health or death. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]