Preferences for Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus for Medications in Shandong Province, China: A Discrete Choice Experiment

PURPOSE: To evaluate preferences for medications among patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) from urban community health stations or rural village clinics in Shandong province, China. METHODS: We use a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to measure the medication preferences. Each patient completed six DCE choice sets. The attributes for the DCE questionnaire include mode of administration, out-of-pocket medication cost per month, fasting blood glucose control effect and frequency of hypoglycemia events. The conditional logit model (Clogit) and mixed logit model (MXL) were used to evaluate choice data. RESULTS: A total of 887 patients with T2DM completed the survey. The mean age of participants was 64 years, 36.42% experienced complications, and the mean duration of diabetes was about 8 years. Overall, patients’ ideal medication would not have hypoglycemia events, provide normal fasting glucose levels, have oral medication three times a day and lower monthly medication cost. Patients prioritized the frequency of hypoglycemia events (β=15.055, P < 0.01) and were willing to spend CNY 393.10 per month to avoid hypoglycemia events. For patients with higher educational levels and with longer diagnosis time, the effect of fasting blood glucose was more relevant than all other outcomes. CONCLUSION: This study provides information on T2DM patients’ preference for medications. Our results suggest that clinical doctors should present patients with a variety of pharmaceutical characteristics and include their preference into medication decision, which will improve patient adherence and health outcomes.