gms | German Medical Science

Background/research question: Patient Decision Aids (PDAs) have been a significant advancement in patient-centered healthcare and shared decision-making (SDM). Guidance from the International Patient Decision Aid Standards (IPDAS) Collaboration has consistently emphasized the importance of using best available evidence from high quality systematic reviews (SRs) for developing PDAs. Indisputably, patients must have comprehensive, unbiased, and reliable information to make effective health decisions. Further, IPDAS recommends that evidence summarization follow principles of EBM and specifically endorses the GRADE standard for evidence appraisal. Despite IPDAS guidance, inconsistent/low quality, biased, and non-transparent information has persisted in PDAs even when developers source their evidence from reliable SRs. The issue may be due to the unique challenges and inordinate number of evidence summarization tasks involved in producing PDAs and also that many PDA developers may not have sufficient expertise in EBM methodology to operationalize IPDAS general guidance of adhering to EBM principles. We aim to bridge this gap by developing a summarization framework tailored to PDAs based on accepted standards from EBM.

Methods: We will use a systematic approach to identify PDA summarization challenges and EBM best practices relevant to health decision-making including clinical practice guidance, PDA, and SDM standards that address those challenges. Specifically, we will make optimal use of state-of-the-art evidence-informed guidance documents including the GRADEPro Handbook, the Cochrane Handbook, Cochrane Overview of Reviews, PRISMA, PRISMA Harms, and other authoritative sources developed to support evidence summarization for other EBM and SDM purposes/contexts.

Preliminary/expected results, outlook: We will systematically identify essential evidence summarization challenges/steps of PDA development and how they are addressed with established EBM standards in the context of SDM. We will develop a PDA evidence summarization framework that operationalizes EBM principles and best practices as an aid to PDA developers who may lack an EBM background.

Competing interests: None