ArticleBMC medicine2023
Informing a target product profile for rapid tests to identify HBV-infected pregnant women with high viral loads: a discrete choice experiment with African healthcare workers.
Article in BMC medicine, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 4 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Evolving Landscape of Discrete Choice Experiments in Health Economics: A Systematic Review.PharmacoEconomics · 2025Pooled it
- Discrete Choice Experiments and Conjoint Analyses in Health Screening Programs for Type 2 Diabetes and Liver Disease: A Scoping Review.Canadian liver journal · 2025Pooled it
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
27 authors at 20 institutions in 15 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundElimination of mother-to-child transmission of hepatitis B virus (HBV) requires infant immunoprophylaxis and antiviral prophylaxis for pregnant women with high viral loads. Since real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), a gold standard for assessing antiviral eligibility, is neither accessible nor affordable for women living in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs), rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) detecting alternative HBV markers may be needed. To inform future development of the target product profile (TPP) for RDTs to identify highly viremic women, we used a discrete choice experiment (DCE) and elicited preference and trade-off of healthcare workers (HCW) in Africa between the following four attributes of fictional RDTs: price, time-to-result, diagnostic sensitivity, and specificity.
methodsThrough an online questionnaire survey, we asked participants to indicate their preferred test from a set of two RDTs in seven choice tasks with varying levels of the four attributes. We used mixed multinomial logit models to quantify the utility gain or loss generated by each attribute. We attempted to define minimal and optimal criteria for test attributes that can satisfy ≥ 70% and ≥ 90% of HCWs, respectively, as an alternative to RT-PCR.
resultsA total of 555 HCWs from 41 African countries participated. Increases in sensitivity and specificity generated significant utility and increases in cost and time-to-result generated significant disutility. The size of the coefficients for the highest attribute levels relative to the reference levels were in the following order: sensitivity (β = 3.749), cost (β = -2.550), specificity (β = 1.134), and time-to-result (β = -0.284). Doctors cared most about test sensitivity, while public health practitioners cared about cost and midwives about time-to-result. For an RDT with 95% specificity, costing 1 US$, and yielding results in 20 min, the minimally acceptable test sensitivity would be 82.5% and the optimally acceptable sensitivity would be 87.5%.
conclusionsAfrican HCWs would prefer an RDT with the following order of priority: higher sensitivity, lower cost, higher specificity, and shorter time-to-result. The development and optimization of RDTs that can meet the criteria are urgently needed to scale up the prevention of HBV mother-to-child transmission in LMICs.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.