Italian patient and nurses preferences for FSH injection devices: A conjoint analysis
Rainel Sanchez-De La Rosa (ES), Rachel Levy-Toledano (NL), Wenjie Zhang (US), Boxiong Tang (US)
[Sanchez-de la Rosa] Teva Pharma Group, [Levy-Toledano] Teva Pharmaceutical Europe BV, [Zhang] WG Group, [Tang] Teva Pharmaceuticals
Context: One critical aspect to improve the likelihood of success in ART is patient adherence to self-injection of FSH. Currently on the Italian market, there are many injection devices used for FSH treatment. Objective: To identify the specific injection device features that were preferred by patients and nurses in Italy. Methods: Preferences of patients and nurses were obtained via an online questionnaire and evaluated using a conjoint analysis, which captures the relative importance of selected FSH injection device attributes to determine specific qualities in overall product preference. Patients and Nurses: We surveyed 69 patients and 9 IVF nurses in Italy. All patients were prescribed an FSH treatment in the past, either for an IVF or for an ovulation induction. Interventions: The survey results were analyzed through multinomial logit modeling. Main Outcome Measures: Respondents’ preferences on the selected attributes were expressed as relative preference ranking normalized to sum to 100%. Results: Both Italian patients and nurses prefer a pen injector to a syringe. For patients, an ideal FSH injection device would be a highly accurate, reusable pen injector, allowing for multiple injections with the same cartridge. For nurses, the ease for nurses to teach is the most important feature followed by the visibility feature that enables users to estimate residual cartridge contents. Conclusion: There is a preference discrepancy between Italian patients and nurses on selected attributes of the IVF products. Patients prefer attributes related to accurate treatment and quality of life while nurses prefer technical attributes. Our study was an unbranded examination of attributes across all injection devices currently on the market. However, our results showed that the preferred product attributes were all characteristics of the Ovaleap pen.