IHE participates regularly in scientific congresses and meetings. Active participation at such events keeps us in touch with the international frontline of research and helps us identify current debates and work in the area. It also enables us to continually develop our own competence.

Founded in 2008, MINERVA is an international network of accomplished and renowned health economic opinion leaders. The members are strategically located in Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden, the UK, and the US and have been pioneers in the development of health economics and outcomes research, and are key opinion leaders in scientific and policy research in the area of guidelines and reimbursement policies.

MINERVA is an international consortium of leaders in the field of health economics and outcomes research who have long-standing relationships with key decision makers in their respective countries, the capacity to perform multi-country health economic evaluations, and impressive publication records in peer-reviewed journals.

Since 2007, IHE is participating in a European Commission research project involving organisations from 10 European countries. The purpose of the project, EuroVaQ - European Value of a Quality Adjusted Life Year, is to develop robust methods to determine the monetary value of a quality adjusted life year (QALY) across a number of European Member States. The project aims to gather information and knowledge from all the participating countries.
A major issue in cost effectiveness analysis is that of the value to place on a quality adjusted life year (QALY), commonly used as a measure of health care effectiveness across Europe. This has come to the fore in several European countries, resulting from the creation of national health technology and pharmaceutical assessment agencies. This critical policy issue is reflected in the growing interest across Europe in development of more sound methods to elicit such a value.
To model a value of a QALY two different approaches are taken in this project: firstly through modelling such a value based on values of statistical lives currently used across the participating countries, and also through a population survey to test two methods of deriving a societal willingness-to-pay (WTP) based monetary value of a QALY.

The project is expected to be completed in February 2010.