I recently completed my PhD work which considered the issues surrounding the economic analysis of genomic diagnostic technologies in the UK NHS, and I hope to publish as much of this work as possible over the next year or so. The first paper reporting the results of this work was published in 2013 in Pharmacogenomics (“Issues surrounding the health economic evaluation of genomic technologies”) and the second paper was published in PharmacoEconomics in 2015 (“Welfarism versus extra-welfarism: can the choice of economic evaluation approach impact on the adoption decisions recommended by economic evaluation studies?”). I’m please to say that the third paper arising from this work was published last week in The Patient (“Patients’ Preferences for Genomic Diagnostic Testing in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia: A Discrete Choice Experiment”).

A key aim of my PhD work was to conduct both welfarist and extra-welfarist economic evaluations of the use of next generation sequencing to guide treatment decisions for patients with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL). The welfarist economic evaluation was informed by a DCE which evaluated patient preferences for genomic testing in this context, and it is the results of this DCE which are reported in this paper.

The key result in the DCE was that CLL patients value both clinical and process-related outcomes when genomic tests are used to guide chemotherapy treatment decisions. These patients also prefer combinations of test characteristics that more closely reflect future genomic testing practice than current genetic testing practice. Future publications will place these results into context by considering how the presentation of risk information modifies these findings, and by combining the willingness-to-pay data in this DCE with cost data in order to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of testing in this context. Hopefully I’ll be able to update this post with news of these publications in a few months’ time!