Dear Lauren,

Welcome to the Shared Decision Making (SDM) program newsletter. In this quarterly newsletter you will find opportunities to collaborate in shared decision making research, participate in a decision worksheet workshop, and review recent publications.

Do you wish you had more tools to support shared decision making with your patients? Are you interested in developing tools to conduct a quality improvement project in your clinical practice? 

Drs. Karen Sepucha, Leigh Simmons, and KD Valentine from the MGH Health Decision Sciences Center are leading a 2-part online workshop, “How to Create a Decision Worksheet,” on Tuesday, September 12th from 5pm- 6:30pm and Tuesday, October 10th from 5pm-6:30pm.

Attendees will create their own Decision Worksheet: a short, paper-based tool designed to support shared decision making in a clinical encounter. In previous workshops, participants have created decision worksheets for use in urogynecology, interventional radiology, and primary care, among others.

Session 1 will be focused on decision worksheet design and risk communication; Session 2 will be focused on prototyping and approaches to elicit patients’ goals and preferences. The faculty will provide individual feedback on participants’ draft decision aids. We welcome participation from physicians, residents, fellows, nurses, physician assistants, health educators, students, and others interested in shared decision making. 

We are seeking participants from all clinical disciplines. If you are interested in participating, please RSVP to kvalentine2@mgh.harvard.edu. 

Please visit our website for more information on our Center and our clinician training.

Highlights from some recent publications:

Value-based healthcare: Integrating shared decision-making into clinical practice

Dr. Sepucha collaborated with Drs. Bozic, Jayakumar and Chen from Dell Medical Center to make the case for why it is so important to implement shared decision making and patient decision aids into orthopedic care.

Performance of the shared decision-making process scale for use in evaluation of hereditary cancer genetic testing decisions

Dr. Valentine and colleagues conducted a two-part survey with patients who completed a pre-test genetic counseling visit to evaluate the feasibility, acceptability, reliability, and validity of the SDM Process Scale for use in evaluating genetic testing decisions.

Getting patients back for routine colorectal cancer screening: Randomized controlled trial of a shared decision-making intervention

There were many challenges to resuming healthcare during the early part of the COVID-19 health crisis, and this study addressed important research questions about how to do this in a safe, equitable and patient-centered manner. The HDSC team found that shared decision making tools and coaching increased patients’ involvement in decisions and their intention to follow through with some type of colon cancer screening.