Patient preference elicitation empowerment.

ABSTRACTThe elicitation of patient preferences has become very prominent in healthcare, along with the increasing degree of participation by patients in their own treatment decision making. Although some conventional patient preference elicitation techniques exist, their outcomes are error prone and unreliable. We believe that software engineering can have an important role in developing patient preference elicitation systems which address some of the outstanding issues in this medical process. The purpose of this paper is to review the existing techniques, to outline the outstanding issues, and to present a novel approach by developing a model-based preference elicitation. The paper describes PPE, an interactive system for eliciting patient preferences. PPE uses a combination of two elicitation strategies with the objective of personalizing the elicitation process. Our research plan is to empirically evaluate our approach and report on different user studies in the immediate future.