Patient preferences in health care research is a familiar element, but their ability to sway decision making in a regulatory setting is somewhat new.
The Food and Drug Administration, after the FDA Reauthorization Act of 2017, now has the ability to bolster their efforts to include patient preference studies in their decision making process.
Medical experts in an editorial featured in The Patient posited this question: “What should the regulatory requirements be for these types of studies?”
Before they could tackle that question, however, there were some “unknowns” in preference studies which needed to be determined.