Preference information can inform and facilitate decision making in a wide variety of contexts including benefit-risk assessment, economic analyses (eg, cost-effectiveness analysis, cost-benefit analysis), clinical product development (eg, target product profile development, clinical trial design, etc.), and shared decision-making. Many decisions could be informed by the study of the preferences across multiple stakeholders, including patients, health care providers, caregivers, parents, children, and/or payers.
The Health Preference Research Special Interest Group-sponsored forum will be organized into three parts. First, we will describe motives for measuring preferences from multiple stakeholders in the context of different types of health decision-making. A range of health-related decision contexts that are relevant in various jurisdictions will be included, including, for example, economic analyses and benefit-risk assessment. The rationale for multiple sets of preferences may be related to the theoretical foundations for determining whose preferences to measure, and stakeholders’ roles in treatment decisions or the capabilities of the stakeholder (age, decision-making capacity/executive function). Second, we will discuss some of the survey design and measurement issues that must be considered when designing survey instruments that are both appropriate for a particular study population and clinically relevant. Reading level, terminology, presentation of quantitative information, and survey complexity should be adapted for the study population. The implications for these adaptations for the relevance of the preference results and the comparability of the results between stakeholder populations will be discussed. Third, we will debate how decision makers may interpret studies indicating either concordant or discordant preferences between different stakeholders and discuss how results might be interpreted to inform decision making. We will illustrate using examples of studies measuring preferences from multiple stakeholders. Finally, we look forward to finding out what you think via polling throughout the forum and the Q&A session.
