Traditional preference elicitation methods, such as discrete choice experiments or time trade-off, usually require large sample sizes. This can limit their applicability in patient populations, where recruiting enough participants can be challenging.
OPUF is a new type of online survey that implements compositional preference elicitation techniques. Central to the method are 3 valuation steps: (1) dimension weighting, (2) level rating, and (3) anchoring. An English demo version of the OPUF survey can be accessed at . From the responses, a personal EQ-5D-5L utility function can be constructed for each participant, and a group-level value set can be derived by aggregating model coefficients across participants.
A total of 122 patients with rheumatic disease from Germany completed the OPUF survey. The survey was generally well received; most participants completed the survey in less than 20 minutes and were able to derive a full EQ-5D-5L value set. The precision of mean coefficients was high, despite the small sample size.
Our findings demonstrate that OPUF can be used to derive an EQ-5D-5L value set from a relatively small sample of patients. Although the method is still under development, we think that it has the potential to be a valuable preference elicitation tool and to complement traditional methods in several areas.