Conjoint Analysis

Excerpt

Incorporating patients’ preferences into medical decision making has been identified as an important element of patient-centered care.[1] Some suggest that preference concordance is critical to high-quality decisions[2] and even to quality care.[3,4] The International Patient Decision Aids Standards (IPDAS) collaboration has recently recommended that preference elicitation should be a component of all decision aids.[5] Together, this line of thinking suggests that attention to patients’ preferences in decision making will continue to grow and should result in positive outcomes related to patient decision making. However, there are virtually no recommendations for how patients’ preferences should be evaluated in medical decision making. Conjoint analysis offers an approach to preference elicitation that shows promise for improving patient-centered care. …