A major program at Massachusetts General Hospital is aiming to primarily increase the availability and quality of decision support information offered to sufferers and their families.
The hospital has partnered with decision support vendor Healthwise to develop the Informed Medical Decisions Program within the Massachusetts General Health Decisions Sciences Center, with Healthwise giving a $2 million, 3-year grant.
The program will involve research to show the value of several tools to improve patient engagement, extend the science of measuring decision quality and assess ways to make sure that patient get the information they require making the best decision for themselves.
“As medical treatments get more complex with interventions that are complicated, patients require more information on outcomes,” claims Michael Barry, MD, medical director of the Stoeckle Center for Primary Care Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital. Barry, a primary care physician for thirty years, recently returned to the hospital from employment at Healthwise to lead the new initiative.
A sufferer diagnosed with breast cancer has several choices of treatment to talk over with the physician, like removing the breast through a mastectomy, having a lumpectomy around the area with cancer and then having radiation, or having a lumpectomy plus 6 to 8 weeks of radiation while keeping part of the breast, which would take a couple of operations and yet have a higher risk that the cancer would come back. That is a lot to sort through, Barry asserts.
Subsequently, the new program will lay out new procedures for better assisting patients make the decision right for them, supplemented with IT.
The bottom line, in accordance to Barry, is that doctors require spending more time and attention helping patients walk through treatment decisions and not just make a diagnosis and set up a treatment plan. Clinicians need to do right for the patient, but without inquiring what the patient really wants, the patient does not know if there is more than one reasonable treatment approach.
“I find myself too readily thinking sufferers will think like me,” Barry applauds. “We have learned that you have got to ask.”
To better inform sufferers, Mass Gen, working with Healthwise, will give patients information packets with decision support aids merged with the patient’s electronic health record (EHR) before they come in the office so they know what queries they want to ask. These kinds of aids also could involve links to procedure-specific websites, or a booklet or DVD.
Sufferers coming in to the office for a follow-up visit and getting a new diagnosis also can get new decision support aids. This, Barry considers, is the future of patient decision support.
In-depth information on the Informed Medical Decisions Program at Massachusetts General Hospital is available here. Barry also suggests a comprehensive decision support website for patients at Ottawa Health Research Institute in Canada, available here.
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