Unbiased assessment of disease surveillance utilities: A prospect theory application.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

We contribute a new methodological approach to the ongoing efforts towards evaluating public health surveillance. Specifically, we apply a descriptive framework, grounded in prospect theory (PT), for the evaluation of decisions on disease surveillance deployment. We focus on two attributes of any surveillance system: timeliness, and false positive rate (FPR).

Methods

In a sample of 69 health professionals from a number of health related networks polled online, we elicited PT preferences, specifically respondents' attitudes towards gains, losses and probabilities (i.e., if they overweight or underweight extreme probabilities) by means of a series of lotteries for either timeliness or FPR. Moreover, we estimated willingness to pay (WTP) for improvements in the two s

SUBMITTER: Attema AE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6513105 | biostudies-literature | 2019 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature