Toward patient-centered telerehabilitation design: Understanding chronic pain patients' preferences for web-based exercise telerehabilitation using a discrete choice experiment

Abstract

Background: Patient-centered design that addresses patients' preferences and needs is considered an important aim for improving health care systems. At present, within the field of pain rehabilitation, patients' preferences regarding telerehabilitation remain scarcely explored and little is known about the optimal combination between human and electronic contact from the patients' perspective. In addition, limited evidence is available about the best way to explore patients' preferences. Therefore, the assessment of patients' preferences regarding telemedicine is an important step toward the design of effective patient-centered care. Objective: To identify which telerehabilitation treatment options patients with chronic pain are most likely to accept as alternatives to conventional rehabilitation and assess which treatment attributes are most important to them. Methods: A discrete choice experiment with 15 choice tasks, combining 6 telerehabilitation treatment characteristics, was designed. Each choice task consisted of 2 hypothetical treatment scenarios and 1 opt-out scenario. Relative attribute importance was estimated using a bivariate probit regression analysis. One hundred and thirty surveys were received, of which 104 were usable questionnaires; thus, resulting in a total of 1547 observations. Results: Physician communication mode, the use of feedback and monitoring technology (FMT), and exercise location were key drivers of patients' treatment preferences (P