Plain Language Summary

Healthcare decisions often involve difficult tradeoffs. Patients may need to choose between treatments that differ in benefits, risks, side effects, or how they affect daily life. Because people value these outcomes differently, the “best” option is not the same for everyone. Shared decision making aims to ensure that medical choices reflect what matters most to each patient, but doing this well is not always easy.

This commentary explores the potential role of stated-preference methods as tools to support patient-centered clinical decision making. These methods ask patients to choose between hypothetical treatment options that differ across key features, such as expected benefits, risks, treatment burden, or how care is delivered. By making choices that involve explicit tradeoffs, patients reveal which outcomes are most important to them and how they balance benefits against risks.

Stated-preference methods have been widely used in areas such as economics and marketing and are increasingly used in healthcare research and policy. More recently, there has been growing interest in using these methods to support individual patients during clinical decision making, especially for complex or preference-sensitive decisions such as starting dialysis, choosing cancer treatments, or deciding on screening tests.

The commentary highlights several potential benefits of these methods. Compared with traditional values clarification approaches, such as rating or ranking treatment attributes, stated-preference methods are designed to better reflect real-world decision making by requiring patients to make tradeoffs. This structured approach can help reveal not only which option a patient prefers, but also why that option aligns with their priorities. Stated-preference methods can also show how consistent a patient’s choices are. Consistent choices may indicate readiness to decide, while inconsistent responses can signal the need for more information, guidance, or time. These methods may be used as part of a broader decision aid or as stand-alone tools focused specifically on clarifying patient values.

However, the commentary also emphasizes important challenges. Some stated-preference tasks can be time-consuming or cognitively demanding, especially for patients with limited health literacy or those facing stressful medical decisions. In addition, many methods were originally designed to understand average preferences across groups, not individual patients. Adapting them for routine clinical use requires careful design, testing, and support.

Looking ahead, the commentary emphasizes that successful implementation will depend on thoughtful design, attention to accessibility, and collaboration among clinicians, researchers, and experts in decision support and implementation science. While more evidence is needed to evaluate their impact in real-world settings, stated-preference methods represent a promising approach for systematically incorporating patient values into clinical decision making.

^{Note: This content was created with assistance from artificial intelligence (AI) and has been reviewed and edited by ISPOR staff. For more information or for inquiries on ISPOR’s AI policy, click here or contact us at info@ispor.org.}