How do physicians most effectively communicate clinical evidence to people facing treatment decisions?☆Communicating evidence for participatory decision making.
- Epstein, RM
- Alper, BS
- Quill, TE
Summary
Question
How can physicians best communicate evidence to people facing treatment decisions to improve understanding, involvement in decision-making and clinical outcomes?
Study design
Systematic review with narrative synthesis.
Main results
Three of 51 identified studies met inclusion criteria. The first study found that decision making was influenced by the order in which survival curves are presented, particularly in older and less-educated people. The second found that women aged 40-65 years preferred human stick figures or faces to histograms, although lower educated people felt that stick figures represented higher risk. The third study suggested that presenting relative risk reduction figures in chemotherapy decision-making may be misleading and that absolute survival benefits or numbers needed to treat were more easily interpreted. However, this result was not reliable for less-well informed patients.
Authors' Conclusions
We lack reliable evidence to suggest how physicians can most effectively communicate clinical evidence to people facing treatment decisions.