Shared Decision-Making: The Gold Standard in Patient-Centered Care, But is it Achievable?

Shared Decision-Making (SDM), with patients requires that clinicians communicate effectively with patients and help them review screening and treatment options to make an informed decision. Implementation of SDM in routine practice, however, has been challenging. Physician challenges to engaging in SDM include patient literacy, numeracy barriers, and patient cultural backgrounds that do not foster autonomous decision-making. Clinicians worry that adding deliberation over medical evidence may take extra time in the encounter, and that patients may not have the skills to evaluate their options. This suggests that improving SDM implementation may require increased provider SDM skills supported by increased training. Dr. Karen Kelly-Blake will present results of a program that expands a previously tested and frequently presented workshop in patient-centered interviewing to engage primary care providers (PCP) in SDM using a Decision Aid that described choices between no treatment and active treatment for stable coronary artery disease (CAD).
Karen Kelly-Blake, PhD
Research Associate in the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences at MSU
Recorded December 12, 2012