PURPOSE To review treatments for osteoarthritis of the knee (OAK) received by patients across five European countries, and to obtain patients' perceptions and willingness to pay for current treatments. PATIENTS AND METHODS A prospective, internet-based, double-blind survey of adults with OAK was conducted in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The questionnaire included que...

Social and medical scientists are often concerned that the external validity of experimental results may be compromised because of heterogeneous treatment effects. If a treatment has different effects on those who would choose to take it and those who would not, the average treatment effect estimated in a standard randomized controlled trial (RCT) may give a misleading picture of its overall im...

OBJECTIVE To determine the influence of demographics on patient preferences for community pharmacist attire. METHODS A 10-item questionnaire was developed and administered to patients visiting a chain pharmacy or an independent pharmacy in the Birmingham, Alabama metropolitan area. Mann-Whitney was used to examine if statistical differences existed in chain versus independent pharmacy patient...

OBJECTIVE To investigate a group of patients' preferences among 3 dry powder inhalers--Accuhaler, Easyhaler, and Turbuhaler--and to analyze the features that were most important for motivating choices. MATERIAL AND METHOD The study enrolled 30 patients with stable asthma with a mean (SD) age of 40 (13) and who habitually used inhaled corticosteroids. The patients were shown in detail how to u...

Disparities in health and health care due to race and ethnicity are a national problem. One commonly proposed method to address disparities is to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in the health professions to serve the needs of growing minority populations. This position is based in part on the racial concordance hypothesis, an untested assumption that minority patients prefer ...

I t is well established that random assignment between experimental treatment and control arms is the gold standard in clinical trials to minimise differences between the groups being compared and safeguard against bias. There is, however, a fear that such random allocation may not accord with patients’ preferences for the intervention or treatment, thereby compromising trial validity. It is po...

BACKGROUND Chronic constipation is an important clinical condition which can result in serious discomfort and even require hospitalization. Powder and liquid lactulose are designated as clinically equivalent for the treatment of constipation, but there are significant differences in the taste, consistency, and portability of the products, which may affect patient compliance and therefore clinic...

Motivated by the rising popularity of electronic appointment booking systems, we develop appointment scheduling models that take into account the patient preferences regarding when they would like to be seen. The service provider dynamically decides which appointment days to make available for the patients. Patients arriving with appointment requests may choose one of the days offered to them o...

Prescribing a triptan for an individual patient is really conducting a triptan preference trial with an n of 1. With the availability of seven triptans, it would not be practical, however, to give the patient three samples of each oral triptan and have them take each triptan when headaches are of a similar degree of intensity (for a total of 21 trials) and then rate their preferences. This is a...

We introduce two criteria for judging “goodness” of the result when combining preference relations in information systems: completeness and consistency. Completeness requires that the result must be the union of all preference relations, while consistency requires that the result must be an acyclic relation. In other words, completeness requires that the result contain all pairs appearing in th...