Patients as research partners in preference studies: learnings from IMI-PREFER.

Research about patients' preferences for medicinal products and treatments is growing. Such research could be improved if patients were involved as 'research partners,' that is, as active members of the study team itself. To date, however, little is known about the actual experience of involving patients as partners in such research. This paper presents learnings from involving patients as partners in 8 case studies conducted as part of IMI-PREFER, a big, European-based project which aimed to develop recommendations about how to conduct preference research. Involving patients as partners led to improvements in the: (1) quality of the research and research process; (2) recruitment of participants; (3) content and design of patient-facing informational materials; and, (4) how and what study results were shared with patient communities. Our findings showed that it is important to plan for patient partners' involvement early on in the design of the preference study so as to ensure that they are fully integrated into the research team and their opportunity to contribute to all stages of the research is optimized. Such planning should address how patient partners will be paid, what their role responsibilities will include, how and when they will be trained and educated, and how they will be supported throughout the course of the study. Having a clearly stated purpose for involving patients as research partners, selecting patient partners who have had prior research experience and relationships with the researchers, and having multiple patient partners on the study team are all also helpful in supporting successful patient involvement. We need more people to share their experiences with involving patient partners in preference research so that we can continue to improve how this is done.