How Should We Elicit Preferences For Health Care?

Main Category: Public Health
Article Date: 22 Nov 2009 - 0:00 PST

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Consumers' preferences for health care have become increasingly important to inform health policy decision making. Discrete choice experiments (DCEs) have become a commonly used technique in health economics to elicit such preferences. In a DCE, choice sets can be unlabeled (e.g. screening test 'A' or 'B') or labeled (e.g. 'fecal occult blood test' or 'colonoscopy'). Assigning meaningful labels has the advantage of realism and provides a less abstract choice task. However, most commonly applied DCEs in health economics used unlabeled alternatives.

A recent study, "Labeled Versus Unlabeled Discrete Choice Experiments: An Application To Colorectal Cancer Screening", published in Value in Health, empirically compared a labeled and an unlabeled DCE for colorectal cancer screening programs. The study was conducted by a team of health economists, epidemiologists and clinicians from Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

The study found that unlabeled DCEs may be more suitable to investigate consumers' trade-offs between characteristics of the alternatives (e.g. between test burden and expected health gain). Unlabeled DCEs are also advantageous for respondents who do not have personal experience with alternative options (in this case: screening tests). Labeled DCEs add realism and are more suitable to explain real life behavior, such as population uptake of cancer screening.

Value in Health (ISSN 1098-3015) publishes papers, concepts, and ideas that advance the field of pharmacoeconomics and outcomes research and help health care leaders to make decisions that are solidly evidence-based. The journal is published bi-monthly and has a regular readership of over 4,000 clinicians, decision-makers, and researchers worldwide.

ISPOR is a nonprofit, international organization that strives to translate pharmacoeconomics and outcomes research into practice to ensure that society allocates scarce health care resources wisely, fairly, and efficiently.

For more information: http://www.ispor.org

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ISPOR