Methods to collect communities' values and preferences about health systems coverage

Health systems do not have the capacity to finance all services. The impact of choosing one option or another is important in order to prioritize health resources. Citizen participation can help to set priorities or to select the interventions that will receive public funding. We reviewed the literature searching for articles that reported mechanisms to gather information about citizens' values or preferences about health system coverage. We identified 363 publications, 18 articles were analyzed in full, and 7 articles were included in the review. Three articles were European, two were from Australia and two from Latin America. The most commonly used mechanisms to gather information were interviews and surveys. We conclude that there is a limited number of articles with examples of tools to capture information about values and preferences in health decision processes. The main barrier observed was the lack of standardized processes to collect the values and preferences of the community.