Preferences and decision making in health care
Individuals make choices about their life styles, whether to use health care, and what services to use. These decisions are also influenced by the availability of health care providers and the recommendations that providers make for treatment. Health system outcomes (aggregate use of services, costs and health outcomes) depend on these choices.
Understanding how individuals make choices is fundamental to understanding how the health system works, and predicting the impact of changes in policy settings or constraints. Often the data available do not include all the factors that are relevant to individuals' choices. Or in the case of new technologies, data simply do not exist as the relevant options are not yet available. Discrete choice modelling of stated preference data can address these crucial gaps and provide more insight into key choices, whether of consumers, providers or funders.
Current projects:
Adolescents and young adults with a life threatening illness: Preferences for support services
Can discrete choice experiments be used to predict uptake of new drugs?
Care and outcomes of care for prostate cancer in New South Wales
Choice experiments for complex choices: the case of contraceptives
Multi-Attribute Utility/Discrete Choice Experiments (MAUDcE)
