Abstract

The measurement and understanding of treatment satisfaction is coming of age; a fact nicely illustrated by this supplement to Value in Health, which presents several approaches to the measurement of treatment satisfaction in multiple diseases. Historically, researchers working within a business and marketing framework were the first to work with the satisfaction construct, and have created an extensive literature on consumer satisfaction. With respect to health, consumer satisfaction was also the first area of study, where such variables as satisfaction with the physician, overall care, or time kept waiting were considered in evaluating the overall quality of care. More recently, treatment satisfaction has become a focus of study, leading to the inevitable development of new disease-specific measures, such as the OsteoArthritis Treatment Satisfaction Questionnaire, a measure of treatment satisfaction in erectile dysfunction [3], as well as a broader, generic measure of satisfaction with medication, the Treatment Satisfaction Questionnaire Medication. Theoretical work, which ought to be leading the way in this new field, has not kept pace. I thought bringing together a collection of articles on the subject of treatment satisfaction would both move the field forward and showcase the work of Pfizer scientists and other colleagues in this area. Clearly, much remains to be learned about the concept of treatment satisfaction, both theoretically and empirically, but treatment satisfaction ought to be considered an important outcome, when applied selectively, for the evaluation of medicines.