Better Decisions, Better Care: Theories of Medical Decision Making and Health

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM) is dedicated to promoting rigorous, scientific research on health care decisions and policy initiatives. For over a quarter century, it has been on the cutting edge in studying decision making and developing support tools to improve the quality of patient care. While these clinical approaches and tools have been reported in medical journals and employed in numerous health care settings, several barriers have limited their more widespread adoption and use for real-time decision making. A major impediment has been the lack of coherent and evidence-based predictive scientific theory. In addition, the recent proliferation of patient decision aids and their use by a wide range of consumers, researchers and policy-makers makes standardized evaluation of their quality more crucial. To address these issues, the theme of this year's annual meeting is Better Decisions, Better Care: Advancing Decision Support to Improve Health Care. A key feature of this year's meeting will be a symposium devoted to presenting leading, empirically supported theories of medical decision making and health. The Society's Annual Meeting (October 14 -18, 2006) features current research in a rich cross-section of disciplines including decision analysis, shared decision making, evidence based medicine, cost effectiveness analysis, health economics, meta-analysis, computational methods, decision psychology, and medical ethics. We seek support for one symposium, a workshop, and 9 short courses. Symposium #2, Theories of Medical Decision Making and Health, will present scientifically rigorous explanatory and predictive theories in health and medical decision making that have been tested empirically. The symposium will bring together leading proponents of influential and diverse theories in medical decision making, and will emphasize the need for theoretically motivated research in domains of practical importance, including behavior change in health, cancer prevention and control, and physician decision making and decision support. Our dinner symposium, Improving Patient Decision-aids by Establishing State-of-the-art Standards for Content: The IPDAS Project, will feature experts in decision aid development and evaluation. The Short Courses will help attendees acquire skills related to the conference theme. Summaries of the symposia will be published in the Society's newsletter and disseminated through the Society's website. Furthermore, the Editor of the journal Medical Decision Making has enthusiastically agreed to publish the proceedings from the conference as a special issue (symposium participants will contribute articles), if funding can be obtained. We anticipate that the proposed program can make major strides toward disseminating research illustrating evidence-based approaches to real time decision-making by patients, physicians, and members of the health care team. This is a venue in which strong intellectual challenges to the status quo can engage the best researchers in the field.