Patient Preferences: An Unexplored Area in the Post-Pandemic Era

The rapid advancement of clinical research has resulted into numerous therapeutic options currently available for most of the diseases. During the patient therapeutic journey, many health-related decisions are necessary requiring patients to choose between the potential health benefits of an intervention, versus the countervailing risk of serious adverse health outcomes. Studies focusing exactly on those patient preferences aim to elicit preferences with the common objective to generate information that facilitates comparing the importance of attributes of interest. The world has experienced a dramatic change in patient’s preferences during the pandemic. Despite the importance of patient preference studies in healthcare decision making, there is a lack of effective storage and accessibility of relevant data for wider use. In this paper the authors present the design of a platform to systematically collect, curate, annotate, index, synthesize and make available pertinent information of patient preference studies so that they can be further exploited by decision support tools.