Communicating About Mortality in Health Decision Support: 'What and Why and When, and How and Where and Who'

The Covid-19 pandemic has only accelerated the need and desire to deal more openly with mortality, because the effect on survival is central to the comprehensive assessment of harms and benefits needed to meet a 'reasonable patient' legal standard. Taking the view that this requirement is best met through a multi-criterial decision support tool, we offer our preferred answers to the questions of What should be communicated about mortality in the tool, and How, given preferred answers to Who for, Who by, Why, When, and Where. Summary measures, including unrestricted Life Expectancy and Restricted Mean Survival Time are found to be reductionist and relative, and not as easy to understand and communicate as often asserted. Full lifetime absolute survival curves should be presented, even if they cannot be 'evidence-based' beyond trial follow-up limits, along with equivalent measures for other criteria in the (necessarily) multi-criterial decision. A decision support tool should relieve the reasonable person of the resulting calculation burden.

People Living with Multiple Long-Term Conditions: Meeting the Challenges of Personalized Decision Making

As with any diagnosis, the underlying purpose of a 'multimorbidity' one is to identify and establish the impact of a person's health conditions on their lives and to facilitate personalized decisions regarding proposed interventions. Clinicians routinely make decisions about the use of interventions for people with multiple long-term conditions. This is challenging because evidence to support this process currently relies on guidance on single health conditions for people without multimorbidity, typically taking fewer medications. Establishing the person's preferences over relevant criteria is central to a person-centered decision-making process, and it is particularly challenging, given the complexities of the person's multiple conditions. The final challenge is in combining the clinician's best estimates of the benefits and harms of possible interventions with the person's preferences. A review of these challenges, drawing on the NICE guidelines, leads to a proposal for using a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis-based support tool for personalized shared decision making for multiple long-term conditions.

Evaluations of Decision Support Tools Are Preference-Sensitive and Interest-Conflicted: The Case of Deliberation Aids

The questions 'What constitutes a good health care decision?', and, by extension, 'What constitutes good healthcare decision support?' continue to be asked. The most developed answers focus largely, often exclusively, on the quality of the 'deliberation' component as the determinant of the quality of the decision or decision aid. We argue that these answers and resulting aids reflect the preferences of healthcare professionals and aid developers and that these preferences are closely aligned with their interests. Some interests are material, but many professional, institutional, intellectual, methodological, and ethical. Successful promotion of a particular preference-sensitive, interest-conflicted decision aid does not change its ontological nature. Conflicts of interest are therefore universal and of concern only when this ontology is denied and if aids based on alternative interest-based preferences, such as technologies involving numerical analytic calculation, are subjected to discrimination.

Decision Quality Is a Preference-Sensitive Formative Concept: How Do Some Existing Measures Compare?

The primary output of a decision making process is a decision and a key outcome measure is therefore decision quality. However, being a formative construct, 'decision quality' is both preference- and context-sensitive and legitimate alternative measures accordingly exist. A decision maker wishing to measure decision quality in the evaluation of a decision or decision making process needs to be aware of the attributes of the measures on offer. This paper establishes some of the key conceptual differences by examining two measures: Decision Quality Instruments and MyDecisionQuality. Four of their main conceptual differences relate to: the timing of the measurement (at the point of decision or at follow-up when the 'downstream' outcome is known); (whether or not an objective assessment of the information state of the individual is included (as opposed to self-reported state); whether the instrument itself is preference-sensitive; and whether the measure is to be used in the context of individualised clinical practice at the point of care or only in research to produce group level feedback. Establishing agreed measures of decision quality is necessary and useful, so long as it is accepted that it is a preference- and context-sensitive construct, in the way that is widely acknowledged in relation to, for example, Health-Related Quality of Life, with its many measures.

Why a Global PROMIS® Can't Be Kept

Composite multi-dimensional constructs, such as 'global mental health' and 'global physical health', in PROMIS® instruments and ICHOM standard outcome sets, are formative, not reflective. Their preference-insensitivity means they are potentially misleading in both clinical and policy decision making practice. Their frequent validation by reflective psychometric tests is also improper methodologically. The spread of these instruments is occurring without sufficient awareness on the part of patients, clinicians, researchers and policy makers that the need for group-specific preference bases ('tariffs') for such measures rules out any possibility of 'international gold standard metrics'.

GP-patient communication about possible cancer in primary care: Re-evaluating GP as gatekeeper

As possibilities for the early detection of indolent cancers, and precursors to cancer, multiply, GPs will increasingly be involved in discussions with patients about risks and benefits of early diagnosis and treatment. Over time, improvements in evidence may decrease uncertainty about outcomes for patients and clinicians. However, where survival benefits are small, or uncertain, or risks are unacceptable to patients, grounds for preference-sensitive decision-making will remain. How risks and benefits of early detection, and the significance of indolent or low risk cancers, are communicated, will be key, if overtreatment and overdiagnosis are to be avoided.