What we do
Our goal is to optimize the value of health care innovation to its most important users, the patient and his/her family, the clinician, nurses and other health care professionals that work with the technology. We elicit values from representative samples of the user population using innovative research methods, such as discrete choice experiments, best-worst scaling and other value trade-off methods. We aim to support actual decision making in practice, on the clinical, organisational and societal level, using multi-criteria decision analysis. Moreover, we use innovative methods to measure patient and other stakeholders heterogeneity and predict individual preferences, to support individual patient choice.
Ongoing Projects
We participate in the MOCHA project, an EU funded project aimed at appraising the differing models of child health that are used across Europe. Our task is to elicit formative values from the general public in European countries, to determine public priorities in the assessment of the quality of a child-oriented primary health care system. For that aim, we have surveyed European citizens in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland and Spain. We recently presented the results of our work in the MOCHA working meeting in Dublin, and are now preparing publication.
We worked together with Daachii Sankyo Europe in this project, aimed at evaluating convenience of anti-coagulant drugs in patients with Non Valvular Atrial Fibrillation (NVAF), and its suspected relationship with therapy adherence. Qualitative interviews and focus groups were performed with clinicians working with and patients with NVAF to determine attributes of convenient therapy. A preference elicitation survey was distributed among 500 patients with NVAF to determine the importance of these attributes, and preferred drug characteristics. We presented our work at the ISPOR conference in Glasgow, Scotland.
Recent research has shown that visual classification of continuous EEG enables ultra-early, high quality prognosis of poor outcome within 24 hours. This technological innovation may deepen existing controversies with regard to expected quality of life of surviving patients. In this NWO project, we evaluate the value of a prognostic test for patients in post-anoxic coma before the technology is implemented. Our work of the project is aimed at evaluating the desirability of such a test from the family and clinician perspective, and to determine the potential barriers and facilitators of such a test in clinical practice.