Health Preference Research

Mission

To provide leadership to advance the development, implementation and use of health preference research in support of health policy, the development of medical products, and patient care.

Background

Understanding the priorities and preferences of patients, caregivers, and other stakeholders is central to health economics and outcomes research. Scientifically rigorous evidence on priorities and preferences is now seen as important in promoting patient-centered drug development, facilitating patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR), informing regulatory benefit-risk analysis, and conducting robust health technology assessment (HTA).

Traditionally, societal priorities and preferences can be inferred from market behavior and prices. However, health markets generally do not meet the assumptions required to be able to make such inferences. In the absence of informative market data, health preference research focuses on the development of instruments and other mechanisms to measure preferences for aspects of health policies, medical products, and patient care. These aspects are systematically evaluated by relevant stakeholders to determine their relative importance. The resulting measures of relative importance offer a unique way to understand the value of health-related initiatives and products.

The measurement of preferences can involve simple intuitive approaches or complex, cutting-edge scientific techniques grounded in advanced decision theories from psychology and economics. The broad array of methods under the stated preference umbrella and the ability to modify them allows their use for any number of research questions.

Leadership

Working Groups:

Key Project

Stated Preference Research in the European Union
Submitted to Value in Health

Understanding Preference Heterogeneity: A survey of the state of practice
In development

Member Engagement

Co-Chairs:

• Christine Poulos, PhD, Senior Research Economist, RTI Health Solutions, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA
• Eline van Overbeeke, PhD student, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
• Janine A van Til, PhD, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences (BMS), University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands
• Siu Hing Lo PhD, Senior Research Manager, Acaster-Lloyd Consulting, London, England, UK

Work Products

1. ISPOR Stated Preference Methods SIG Survey Report 2018
2. Patient Preference Methods - A Patient Centered Evaluation Paradigm
3. Understanding Conjoint Analysis Applications in Health

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