What is it about?
Many healthcare decisions involve trade-offs between benefits, risks, and costs. Decision scientists have developed tools to help people make these kinds of difficult decisions. They are called multi-criteria decision tools because they address how to make trade-offs between criteria that measure how well an option meets a decision goal. We sought to determine if they could be adapted for use in routine clinical care We examined the ease of use and impact on decisions of 5 multi-criteria tools that varied in complexity using an Internet survey population. We found that tools with increasing levels of decision support had a greater impact on decisions but that the complexity of the tool was not directly associated with ease of use. These results suggest it is possible to develop decision support tools using sophisticated multi-criteria tools suitable for use in routine clinical care settings.
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Why is it important?
The quality of healthcare ultimately depends on choosing the most appropriate course of action for each patient. This is a difficult task that involves integrating research evidence, patient preferences, and clinical judgment. Multi-criteria tools are proven tools to help people make these decisions. This study demonstrates that there is a good chance they can be adapted to make them suitable for routine clinical use.
Perspectives
We, and others, have repeatedly demonstrated how multi-criteria methods can be successfully used to examine clinical decisions. This study builds on this prior work by providing evidence that clinically feasible and useful tools based on multi-criteria methods can be developed. The next step is to work on making the appropriate adaptations, learning how they can be integrated into routine clinical care, and testing their impact on practice and patient outcomes.
James Dolan
University of Rochester
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Feasibility of Sophisticated Multicriteria Support for Clinical Decisions, Medical Decision Making, October 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0272989x17736769.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Balance Sheets versus Decision Dashboards to support patient treatment choices: A comparative analysis
Comparison of interactive decision dashboards with static balance sheets.
Multi-criteria clinical decision support: A primer on the use of multiple criteria decision making methods to promote evidence-based, patient-centered healthcare
Step by step description of how multi-criteria methods can be applied to healthcare decisions.
Contributors
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