Patient Preference Trade-offs for Next-Generation Kidney Replacement Therapies

Next-generation implantable and wearable KRTs may revolutionize the lives of patients undergoing dialysis by providing more frequent and/or prolonged therapy along with greater mobility compared with in-center hemodialysis. Medical device innovators would benefit from patient input to inform product design and development. Our objective was to determine key risk/benefit considerations for patients with kidney failure and test how these trade-offs could drive patient treatment choices.

We developed a choice-based conjoint discrete choice instrument and surveyed 498 patients with kidney failure. The choice-based conjoint instrument consisted of nine attributes of risk and benefit pertinent across KRT modalities. Attributes were derived from literature reviews, patient/clinician interviews, and pilot testing. The risk attributes were serious infection, death within 5 years, permanent device failure, surgical requirements, and follow-up requirements. The benefit attributes were fewer diet restrictions, improved mobility, pill burden, and fatigue. We created a random, full-profile, balanced overlap design with 14 choice pairs plus five fixed tasks to test validity. We used a mixed-effects regression model with attribute levels as independent predictor variables and choice decisions as dependent variables.

All variables were significantly important to patient choice preferences, except follow-up requirements. For each 1% higher risk of death within 5 years, preference utility was lower by 2.22 ( β =-2.22; 95% confidence interval [CI], -2.52 to -1.91), while for each 1% higher risk of serious infection, utility was lower by 1.38 ( β =-1.46; 95% CI, -1.77 to -1.00) according to comparisons of the β coefficients. Patients were willing to trade a 1% infection risk and 0.5% risk of death to gain complete mobility and freedom from in-center hemodialysis ( β =1.46; 95% CI, 1.27 to 1.64).

Despite an aversion to even a 1% higher risk of death within 5 years, serious infection, and permanent device rejection, patients with kidney failure suggested that they would trade these risks for the benefit of complete mobility.