Parental Preferences for Vesicoureteral Reflux Treatment: a Crowd-sourced, Best-worst Scaling Study.

Abstract

OBJECTIVE:To quantitatively evaluate parental preferences for the various treatments for vesicoureteral reflux using crowd-sourced best-worst scaling, a novel technique in urologic preference estimation. METHODS:Preference data were collected from a community sample of parents via two best-worst scaling survey instruments published to Amazon's Mechanical Turk online community. Attributes and attribute levels were selected following extensive review of the reflux literature. Respondents completed an object case best-worst scaling exercise to prioritize general aspects of reflux treatments and multi-profile case best-worst scaling to elicit their preferences for the specific differences in reflux treatments. Data were analyzed using multinomial logistic regression. Results from the object-case provided probability scaled values (PSV) that reflected the order of importance of attributes. RESULTS:We analyzed data for 248 and 228 respondents for object and multi-profile case BWS, respectively. When prioritizing general aspects of reflux treatment, effectiveness (PSV=20.37), risk of future urinary tract infection (PSV=14.85) and complication rate (PSV=14.55) were most important to parents. Societal cost (PSV=1.41), length of hospitalization (PSV=1.09), and cosmesis (PSV=0.91) were least important. Parents perceived no difference in preference for the cosmetic outcome of open versus minimally invasive surgery (p=0.791). Bundling attribute preference weights, parents in our study would choose open surgery 74.9% of the time. CONCLUSIONS:High treatment effectiveness was the most important and preferred attribute to parents. Alternatively, cost and cosmesis were among the least important. Our findings serve to inform shared parent-physician decision-making for vesicoureteral reflux.