- Primary Investigator:
Robert J. Volk - Primary Location:
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Department of General Internal Medicine - Grant Type & Year:
IIG 2009
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to develop and validate an online educational program to promote shared decision making (SDM) for primary care physicians in their clinical practices. While the study aims to improve physician SDM skills for any kind of diagnostic or treatment decision, prostate cancer screening is used as the decision making model in the educational program.
This project has three specific aims:
Specific aim 1: To identify skills physicians need to develop, and key behaviors they should exhibit, for promoting SDM with their patients.
Specific aim 2: To develop a web-based educational curriculum using Design A Case© (DAC) software to improve physician competencies for SDM in routine practice.
Specific aim 3: To implement and validate the educational program in a sample of primary care physicians.
Findings
Data Analysis: Evaluation data on the DAC program will be available in the latter portion of the project.
Interesting findings: We found a large number of shared decision making training programs, coding systems, and conceptual approaches through our search. Despite wanting to limit the review to training programs in the U.S., we were quickly referred to several training programs in Canada, the U.K. and Germany, which were subsequently included in the review. The task proved to be far larger than we initially anticipated and required additional time to abstract competencies and draft key behaviors. Originally, we planned this initial task to include a formal Delphi voting process, with the goal of achieving consensus on those key physician behaviors required for a shared decision making process. We now plan to conduct the Delphi voting process during the remaining project period as well as begin development of the DAC program without the results of consensus voting. Therefore, for the DAC program, we have decided to only select behaviors in which there is already agreement across multiple coding systems and training programs.
