- Primary Investigator:
Glyn Elwyn - Primary Locations:
Cardiff University, Department of Primary Care and Public Health
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Department of General Internal Medicine
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
University of Ottawa - Project Type & Year:
Special Project 2009
Purpose
The International Patient Decision Aid Standards (IPDAS) Collaboration has led to the development of a quality checklist and, more recently, an instrument to assess the quality of decision support interventions. We recognize that further work is required to examine the relationships between International Patient Decision Aid Standards instrument (IPDASi) scores and the outcomes achieved in clinical trials.
The project has four key aims:
1. To correlate IPDASi quality scores with outcome measurements achieved in decision aid trials included in the Cochrane Review.
2. To increase the comparative strength of the IPDASi database for quality ratings.
3. To improve the validity and reliability of IPDASi.
4. To conduct a Delphi consensus process to develop expert agreement on core criteria and minimum standards for IPDASi.
Findings
One of the key lessons learned to date is that it is difficult to obtain older decision support interventions, especially when they have been created in a format that is no longer in wide use (e.g., laser disk). This has contributed to the relatively small sample size. If the same processes were to be carried out again using the most up-to-date version of the Cochrane Review, currently being prepared, it would be easier to obtain the more recently developed tools. The sample size is also constrained by the number of studies that use relevant outcome measures in their RCTs (those that map to IPDASi) and the consistency with which these outcomes are mentioned. Again, if we were to repeat the study with the more recent version of the Cochrane Review, we would have a larger number of RCTs to include. Subsequently, this would probably increase the number of RCTs that have used relevant outcome measures. We feel this is an important implication for the design of future research studies that are researching the effect of decision support interventions.
