9^th European Epidemiology and Public Health Congress

Background: Psoriasis is an autoimmune disease that inflicts a pronounced negative impact on patients’ quality of life. A mixed-method study was designed aimed to provide a multi perspective understanding of the burden of disease to determine relative concerns or patients and physicians and to determine outcome measures and develop qualitative interviews.

Methods: A Group Concept Mapping (GCM) exercise was performed in which participating patients and clinicians responded to an online prompt asking what qualities they want in an ideal treatment for psoriasis. Responses were sorted into groups and rated according to importance by participants, mapped into domains and statistically analyzed for correlation between clinician and patient responses.

Results: Twenty (20) patients and 10 clinicians participated in the study. Using multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis, seven domains for treatment importance were configured. The order of importance of the domains based on their average ratings showed that concepts are located along the slope intercept, indicating

there was a strong correlation between the two participant groups. Both groups identified accessibility, safety, general efficacy and proximal benefits as the most important domains. All domains per combined ratings were regarded as at least moderately important because they had an average treatment importance value above the midpoint on the 0 to 10 rating scale (>5.0). Good agreement was found across individual concept ratings as well (r=0.81).

Conclusion: This GCM study found that patients and clinicians were generally in agreement over which factors are most important in the treatment of psoriasis.