Health preference research

Program Co-Leads

Choice and decision-making are at the heart of health and healthcare, including individual decisions such as what to eat, or which healthcare service to choose, plus healthcare organisations choosing what type of services to offer, or policymakers deciding where to invest public resources.

We study preferences, choice, and decision-making through methods such as discrete choice experiments (DCEs) to help understand what drives choices, what trade-offs people make, and how people are likely to respond or behave. DCEs can help with designing healthcare and health policies to improve uptake and acceptability.

The results include quantified estimates of uptake and how changes to aspects of a service affect participation. This can help with targeting responses to barriers and facilitators, and addressing inequalities in healthcare participation.

We study preferences of patients, families, healthcare providers, and policymakers. Our findings can contribute to patient-oriented care, improving delivery and access to healthcare, and help to design ways to address complex and difficult issues in health. Advantages of using DCEs and other preference techniques include:

  • We can go beyond a list of desirable or undesirable attributes to produce quantitative predictions of uptake or change in uptake according to different scenarios,
  • We can explore trade-offs people make between different features of a good, service, or policy – such as trading off desired aspects (like better health) for undesired aspects (like cost or waiting time),
  • We can observe choices that are otherwise unobserved, or explore goods or services that aren’t yet available,
  • They allow us to disentangle the impact of factors that usually go together, such as higher cost and better quality,
  • By combining qualitative and quantitative methods, these methods allow for a rich understanding of the factors affecting choice and behaviour.
  • By eliciting the preferences of the population for various health states we can develop national value sets for preference-based measures used in health technology assessment.

Resources

Discrete Choice Experiments

Have you heard of discrete choice experiments (DCEs) but aren't sure what they are or what they can do? Perhaps you're thinking of including one in an upcoming project but don't really know where to start. In this introductory seminar you will hear what DCEs are and how they can be used in health research. Our friendly panel of health economists (Dr Jemimah Ride, Dr Thao Thai, Dr Lidia Engel and A/Prof Jason Ong) show how DCEs have helped in a range of projects.

Recent highlights

Ride J, Goranitis I, Meng Y, LaBond C, Lancsar E. A Reporting Checklist for Discrete Choice Experiments in Health: The DIRECT Checklist. Pharmacoeconomics. 2024 Sep 3. doi: 10.1007/s40273-024-01431-6.

This paper provides a checklist to guide reporting of discrete choice experiments related to health and healthcare. Multiple reviews have called for better reporting standards for discrete choice experiments (DCEs) in health, highlighting inconsistent and insufficient reporting of methodological detail. This study describes the development of a reporting checklist for DCEs in health using a scoping review to identify potential items, a Delphi consensus study among DCE experts to inform item selection and the wording and structure of the checklist, and piloting by a group of inexperienced DCE researchers who found it to be useful and easy to use. The checklist is presented along with a guidance statement, with the goal that the checklist will become standard practice among DCEs in health, thereby improving transparency and assessment of study quality and enabling comparison of studies and their translation into policy and practice.

Thai T, Bliemer M, Chen G, Spinks J, de New S, Lancsar E. Comparison of a full and partial choice set design in a labeled discrete choice experiment. Health Economics. 2023 Jun;32(6):1284-1304. doi: 10.1002/hec.4666.

In this paper, we introduce a novel experimental design that presents a subset of alternatives to participants (known as the partial choice set design) and compare its performance to the traditional full choice set design where all options are presented. Our study demonstrates that the partial choice set design can effectively reduce cognitive burden while satisfying the convergent validity compared to the full choice set design.

Lancsar E, Ride J, Black N, Burgess L, Peeters A. Social acceptability of standard and behavioral economic inspired policies designed to reduce and prevent obesity. Health Economics. 2022 Jan;31(1):197-214. doi: 10.1002/hec.4451.

This paper examines the preferences of Australian taxpayers for policies that target prevention or reduction of obesity. Our results show that there is public support for obesity reduction and prevention policies and a willingness to fund this through taxation. Counter to recent policy emphasis, we find public support for policies involving regulation and less appetite for ‘nudge’ type policies..

Ride J, Cameron L, Jones R, Dalziel K, Wurzel D, Kao KT, Freeman JL, Hiscock H. Preferences of parents for mental health services to suit children with chronic medical conditions. Australian Health Review. 2022 Dec;46(6):722-730. doi: 10.1071/AH22075.

In this paper, we seek to inform the pathways from hospital outpatient care to mental healthcare for children with chronic medical conditions, who have high unmet needs for mental healthcare. In addition to reducing cost and wait time, we find that specific targets for this group include equipping medical specialists to recommend mental health providers and training mental health providers on the impacts of chronic medical conditions on children.