Preferences for Rheumatoid Arthritis Prevention – Case Study

Understanding Preferences for Rheumatoid Arthritis Prevention

CASE STUDY
First published October 2022
Results published: https://doi.org/10.1093/rheumatology/keac397

IMI PREFER, a major public-private consortium, commissioned SurveyEngine for a mixed-method patient preference study that brings Choice Experiments and Thresholding together.

THE PROJECT

Understanding preferences for preventive pharmacological interventions of a rare disease, while testing different research methodologies—these were the two goals that the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), Europe’s largest public-private cooperation in health, set out to achieve.

IMI’s patient preferences research group PREFER commissioned SurveyEngine to build, recruit, and implement a mixed-method patient preferences study, focusing on preventive interventions of rheumatoid arthritis (RA).

Technical solution

In this study, the IMI-PREFER group sought to compare two different methods widely used in patient preferences research: a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to assess preferences for preventive pharmacologic interventions in RA, and an application of the probabilistic threshold technique (PTT).

The simultaneous use of two methods in a study requires a flexible data collection tool. The integral flexibility of the SurveyEngine platform allows health researchers to obtain data on patient preferences using a variety of elicitation methods. Users can customize steps in the survey structure, select trade-offs, and calculate pathways in real-time

Recruitment solution

The study was planned to be carried out across three countries and in three different languages.

The sample requirements included first-degree relatives of patients with RA, as they are a risk group, and a representative selection of members of the general public in the UK, Germany, and Romania, to assess their attitudes toward RA treatments.

SurveyEngine recruited the population sample and assisted the research group in obtaining the risk-group sample through clinical outreach in providing a compliant data-collection environment.

About us

SurveyEngine developed the software to run the first Best-Worst and Choice Experiments online with Professor Louviere in Australia. Now established as a Berlin based company since 2016, SurveyEngine remains focussed on Choice Modelling methods, providing professional consulting services, cloud-based software for Choice Modelling and research respondent sampling solutions.