What outcomes are important to patients with long term conditions? A discrete choice experiment.

Objective: To assess how much patients with long-term conditions value self-efficacy (i.e., confidence in their ability to manage their condition) compared with other health outcomes, including measures of quality of life, and process outcomes including access to General Practitioners.

Methods: Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) set in UK community settings.

Participants: 367 patients (mean age 57.5) living in the community with a wide range of self-defined long-term conditions.

Main Outcome Measures: The relative value that individuals place on four specific outcomes, namely, self-efficacy, Health Related Quality of Life (HRQoL), access to General Practitioners, and level of isolation.

Results: Most responders completed their questionnaire in a consistent manner. Most valuations of outcomes were in the expected direction and were statistically significant. A substantial minority of responders exhibited counter-intuitive preferences. The existence of a significant constant in all models raised concerns about model misspecification. Nevertheless, all models showed that participants were willing to trade substantial reductions in their HRQoL for improvements in their self-efficacy.

Conclusions: The majority of patients with chronic conditions were able to complete the DCE questionnaires. However, the existence of counter-intuitive preferences and evidence of model misspecification require further investigation. These issues are largely overlooked in the health economics literature. Self-efficacy is an important outcome for this group and is not included explicitly in conventional HRQoL measures. This is potentially important where decisions are made on the basis of cost-effectiveness using Quality Adjusted Life Years as the metric. Exclusion of these outcomes may lead to the cost-effectiveness of these interventions being understated.