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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Amalia M. Issa, PhD, MPH and L. Todd Weiss, MPH, MSPH. Program in Personalized Medicine and Targeted Therapeutics, University of Houston and The Methodist Hospital, Abramson Center for the Future of Health, 300 Technology Building, Suite 309 T2, Houston, TX 77204-4021, 713-743-5649, aissa@uh.edu

Delivering personalized medicine involves integrating genetic data with clinical and family histories in order to more coherently tailor therapeutics to individual patients. To date, little research has been conducted to understand how pharmacogenomic-based testing and prescribing of drugs will be accepted and adopted by patients. Our objectives were: (1.)To develop and validate a survey instrument for quantifying patient preferences for particular attributes of personalized medicine and targeted therapeutics; (2.)To assess the feasibility of using conjoint analysis as a method to assess preferences for personalized medicine by conducting a pilot study. Conjoint analysis (CA) is a method that is increasingly being used in healthcare to quantitatively elicit revealed preferences. Using CA allows us to focus on the trade-offs between health outcomes and non-health processes or outcomes. Preliminary results revealed that 36% of participants were concerned with issues surrounding privacy and confidentiality of genetic test results, 23% were concerned with potential costs of testing, and 18% cited issues related to accuracy of test results as being of important concern. Questions regarding willingness to pay revealed that patients would be more willing to pay out-of-pocket if the disease associated with pharmacogenomic testing for treatment was perceived to be high risk (e.g. cancer) vs. a chronic condition that was perceived as lower risk (e.g. high cholesterol). Individual variability in preferences for efficacy, safety and other attributes of personalized medicine is significantly present. As far as we are aware, our study is the first to use CA to explore patient preferences for pharmacogenomic-based diagnostic-drug combinations.

Learning Objectives:

• Define personalized medicine.
• Better understand the clinical and decision-making issues related to the use of personalized medicine to tailor therapeutics.
• Describe conjoint analysis, its uses, methodology, advantages and disadvantages.
• Describe alternative approaches for assessing patient preferences in public health.
• Articulate pros and cons of using alternative approaches for eliciting preferences in public health research.

Keywords: Patient Perspective, Public Policy

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Not Answered