PURPOSE: With an increasingly competitive landscape for novel therapies, understanding how physicians make choices between available alternatives has become critical for pharmaceutical manufacturers, payer organizations and regulatory agencies alike. Whether and how quickly new therapies are adopted by physicians is often unclear upon market launch, and there is both a lack of available data on physician preferences driving clinical decision-making and inattention to the broader clinical ecosystem facilitating or inhibiting uptake. With the FDA Patient-Focused Drug Develop program, there has been an emphasis on incorporating patient voices and preferences into value assessment for some therapies, and some of the methods developed to elicit patient preferences can be applied to understand provider decision-making as well.

DESCRIPTION: This workshop will introduce various mixed-methods research techniques used to systematically elicit physician decision-making practices and criteria used to select between treatment alternatives. Dr. Batt will provide an introduction, along with an overview of key areas where understanding physician deliberations and decision-making around treatment is critical for payers, manufacturers and health care systems (10 minutes). Dr. May-Slater will outline how qualitative research methods such as physician interviews, focus groups, and implementation sciences approaches can be used to inform quantitative approaches to elicit physician preferences. She will also discuss discrete choice experiments (DCE) as ways to assess how physicians trade-off between different treatment attributes in making treatment recommendations (20 minutes). Dr. Graf will discuss the use of expert elicitation methods such as the Delphi, Sheffield Expert Elicitation Framework (SHELF) and Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDA) frameworks to understand how physicians interpret emerging evidence and incorporate novel therapeutic options into treatment recommendations (20 minutes). Drs. Batt and May-Slater will then facilitate an interactive exercise, asking workshop participants to brainstorm how provider preferences can be used to inform decision-making for two rare disease case studies (10 minutes).