Lay summary
Healthcare funding is constrained, and it is important to ensure that health services, including the tests that are used to diagnose illness, deliver value-for-money. Key to this is understanding what ‘value’ is, and how to measure it, to inform decision makers' choices. Measuring value in diagnostics tests is difficult and our current tools are not always useful. Alice Minhinnick, an oncology clinician interested in translational research that informs cancer policy, will explore the definition of value and understand what is valued in cancer molecular tests (where tissue and blood are tested to look for genes and proteins) in the Aotearoa context. The research will look at what patients (Māori and non-Māori), whānau, clinicians, funders and funding decision-makers value. These views on value will be used to develop a tool to measure the value of cancer molecular tests. This tool will help future assessments of new technologies like diagnostics.