Established in 1987, the EuroQol Group first met to test the feasibility of jointly developing a standardized non disease specific instrument for describing and valuing health-related quality of life.

The Group comprises a network of international, multilingual, multidisciplinary researchers, originally from seven centres in England, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. The process of shared development, local experimentation and lively discussion resulted in EQ-5D, a measure generating a single index value for health status with considerable potential for use in health care evaluation.

EQ-5D was initially developed simultaneously in Dutch, English, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish. It is now widely used in many countries around the world and has been translated into most major languages with the Group closely monitoring the process.