JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Digital technologies are increasingly used to meet patients’ unfilled needs on their patient journey. Patients must be adherent with the unfamiliar digital intervention to achieve their goals. Therefore, Acceptance is a key factor for implementing innovations. We will investigate the acceptance of digital technologies in health care with a focus on stroke rehabilitation.

Objective:

This paper describes the methodology and development of an ongoing health preference research study. This study aims to elicit patients' and public preferences of digital technologies in health care to analyze the impact on acceptance and understand the value of digital interventions.

Methods:

To obtain information on criteria impacting acceptance, a discrete choice experiment (DCE) will be conducted including 7 attributes based on formative qualitative research. Stroke patients (experimental) and general population (control) are surveyed. The study populations are (1) stroke patients (experimental group) and (2) the general population (control group). The final instrument includes six best-second-best tasks in partial design. The experimental design is a fractional-factorial efficient Bayesian design (D-error). A conditional logit regression model and mixed logistic regression models will be used for analysis. To consider the heterogeneity of subgroups, a latent class analysis and analysis on heteroskadasticity will be performed.

Results:

The literature review, the qualitative preliminary study, survey development and pretesting were completed. Data collection and analysis will be completed in the last quarter of 2023.

Conclusions:

This health preference research study provides information on preferences to analyze criteria impacting acceptance and the value of innovative interventions using digital technologies. Developers, health care provider and policy makers often make difficult decisions about development, reimbursement, and the choice on the benefit-maximizing intervention for each patient (group). Therefore, we aim to inform decision-makers to support a patient-centric health care system. Clinical Trial: Ethics and dissemination: The preference survey instruments, the informed consent form, and the study design were reviewed and approved by the ethics committee of Hochschule Neubrandenburg (HSNB/177/21).