BACKGROUND Patients, identified to be at risk for but who have never experienced a potentially lethal cardiac arrhythmia, have the option of receiving an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) as prophylaxis against sudden cardiac death - a primary prevention indication. In Canada, there is no clear framework to support patients' decision-making for these devices. Decision support, using ...

OBJECTIVES (a) To determine which of two values clarification exercises (VCE), based on theoretical decision rules used naturally by people, would be more helpful to patients making a treatment decision and (b) to evaluate the convergent validity of the most helpful VCE when part of a decision aid for the treatment of early-stage prostate cancer. METHODS Two studies were completed. Study 1: N...

OBJECTIVE Patient decision aids have been used in many clinical situations to improve the patient centeredness of care. A patient decision aid for patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has not been developed or tested. The authors evaluated the effects of a patient decision aid on the patient centeredness of PTSD treatment. METHODS The study was a randomized trial of a patient de...

Decision makers’ initial and continued use of information technology has traditionally been viewed as a mindful and intentional behavior. However, when a decision aid makes mostly correct recommendations, its users may become complacent. That is, users may accept recommendations without mindfully considering the recommendations or involvement with the aid. As such, they may be more likely to ac...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether a decision aid designed for adults with low education and literacy can support informed choice and involvement in decisions about screening for bowel cancer. DESIGN Randomised controlled trial. SETTING Areas in New South Wales, Australia identified as socioeconomically disadvantaged (low education attainment, high unemployment, and unskilled occupations). PA...

OBJECTIVE  To compare the effectiveness of shared decision making with usual care in choice of admission for observation and further cardiac testing or for referral for outpatient evaluation in patients with possible acute coronary syndrome. DESIGN  Multicenter pragmatic parallel randomized controlled trial. SETTING  Six emergency departments in the United States. PARTICIPANTS  898 adults...

OBJECTIVES The first aim of this workshop was to define pharmacoeconomic concepts and terminology. Pharmacoeconomics can be defined as the branch of economics that uses cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness, cost-minimization, cost-of-illness and cost-utility analyses to compare pharmaceutical products and treatment strategies. Economic evaluations provide healthcare decision-makers with valuable in...

Classification problems refer to the assignment of some alternatives into predefined classes (groups, categories). Such problems often arise in several application fields. For instance, in assessing credit card applications the loan officer must evaluate the characteristics of each applicant and decide whether an application should be accepted or rejected. Similar situations are very common in ...

A decision aid for osteoarthritis was developed using the best available evidence on effect size, potential harms and self-rated performance for other attributes. The aid was developed using a multi-criteria decision analytic tool capable of combing evidence and an individual's preferences for the attributes related to treatment.

BACKGROUND PubMed data potentially can provide decision support information, but PubMed was not exclusively designed to be a point-of-care tool. Natural language processing applications that summarize PubMed citations hold promise for extracting decision support information. The objective of this study was to evaluate the efficiency of a text summarization application called Semantic MEDLINE, e...