Using patient decision aids in the consultation

A few months ago I asked Jon Brassey of Tripdatabase, a clinical search engine or metasearch, if he could ask patient decision aids to the database. Patient decision aids (PDAs) are tools that are made with the aim of helping patients make decisions about treatment options through considering the risks and benefits of options. They are produced by the UK National Prescribing Centre (NPC) and NHS Direct, amongst others. The advantage of having them listed in a metasearch is that I don't have to go round several sites checking if they might have a decision aid on the topic I am interested in.

Tripdatabase is a small but dynamic organisation and it makes great use of social media. Jon uses a Facebook page to get feedback from users, and I was able to give him my suggestion my sending him a tweet. You can see how quickly he responded here, but the short version is that in less than 3 weeks PDAs were added to Trip!

I've recorded the following screencast to show how I used Tripdatabase to share decison making with a patient. In this case the decision to start warfarin to reduce the risks of stroke in atrial fibrillation had been made in secondary care but we were able to review the evidence for this together. We also used the NPC patient decision aid to review the risks and benefits of warfarin treatment.



As you can see the NPC decision aid is not perfect. I don't think that a PDF is the ideal format for exploring this information online. And I don't have access to a colour printer in the surgery so if printing it might be good to have the option to print a version that was not so dependent on colour graphics.

Have you any thoughts on how PDAs can be incorporated into consultations? Please leave a comment!

EDIT 7/2/2012 As I mention in the audio here I explicitly asked this patient's consent to share this story.

EDIT 7/12/2015 Key learning for me in this was that the patient had different concerns to that which I assumed they had. I thought they were worried about inconvenience of warfarin (for given benefit), but they were actually concerned about risk of harm. The decision aid reassured them about risk of harm.

What happens when you have a brilliant website but you don't have search and google doesn't seem to know about you?

Answer: your content can't be accessed and most people don't know about your website. EDIT Unless they search tripdatabase.

Behind the headlines is an excellent service. Here you can find the background to the latest health stories that you find reported in the UK press. The problem is that it is hard to find what is there. The NHS Choices website seems to exclude BtH from its search. Google doesn't seem to know about the content of the BtH website. Infact, the only way of getting to BtH content seems to be through Tripdatabase, the excellent metasearch.

But, BtH does have it's own twitter feed! Yes, you can follow @NHSNewsUk!

Maybe NHSChoices thinks that content in BtH is of no interest after a few days and that no-one will ever want to look past what is on their front page. They are wrong.

To me this is evidence why anyone who produces content should think about search first and social media later. Get the basics right.

Accessing Evidence-Based Medicine

There is discussion in blogs at the moment about the limits of Evidence-based medicine and how it may be impacted by web2.0 technologies. Laikas, a Dutch librarian, posted about this recently. Sarah Stewart, a midwife from NZ, replied by describing some of the difficulties faced by the public in accessing EBM and the resulting asymmetry of information between doctors and patients.

This reminded me of a You-Tube video I came across last year.

It is an interview Muir Gray, the NHS Chief Knowledge Officer (a post he first floated in 1998 in the BMJ), describes his view of the future of information in the NHS. Resources will be equally available to patients, (or to use his term, citizens) and to professionals. As a clinician and citizen I think this is an enlightened policy. I find much of the content on the NHS choices website very exciting, including Behind the Headlines. BtH gives an evidence-based critique of health stories in the press. I do not like Map of Medicine..... but more about that later:)

To illustrate some of the different sources of EBM available I am going to look at guidance on the management of stable COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease).

First of all here is the page from the BMJ's Clinical Evidence site. I find this very unhelpful. If I wanted to know about one particular treatment and the evidence base, or lack of, for it's use in the management of the condition, this would be useful. But it is not at all useful for a brief synopsis of how to manage the condition.

Next, Clinical Knowledge summaries COPD page. This has many different levels of information and takes quite a lot of clicking around. But it is likely to be useful to a clinician in a surgery. And probably to patients/citizens as well.

GP Notebook is in my experience a favourite of UK GPs. Looking at it's info on the management of stable COPD it is clear that the guidance is related to the NICE guideline on the topic because it references the NICE guidance, and describes different steps for mild/moderate and severe levels of disease. This looks the easiest to access and most clinically relevant so far.

Lastly, we have the Map of Medicine stable COPD page. This annoys me on many levels. For one we are told under 'indications for referral' that this should be considered for severe COPD, but you have to go down to 'follow-up care in severe disease' to find out what the criteria for diagnosing severe COPD is.

What do you use to access EBM? Are different sites useful for different purposes? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

EDIT 11/8/10 I've reviewed the Map of Medicine page (previous link had died- new one is current) and it still does not make diagnosis criteria clear, unfortunately. Time to drop them a tweet!

The tag cloud of clinical uncertainty :-)

The tag cloud of clinical uncertainty is a graphical representation of the areas of medical research where we still don't have the answers that would help us day to day as practitioners. It is part of the new TripAnswers website, which takes a clinical question answering approach but allows comments from other users. At the moment the site does not seem to be fully functional, but I think it is a great idea.

And for some reason the Tag Cloud of Clinical Uncertainty makes me think of Bill Bailey. I hope that doesn't seem too irreverent ;-)