Patient Empowerment with Shared Decision Spaces

Abstract Patients face significant challenges when trying to understand the relative advantages and disadvantages of the variety of treatment options for serious diseases. This paper presents a description and evaluation of a novel visual decision aid designed to support shared decision making between patients and physicians. The objective of this research is empower patients to understand the differences among treatments that people like them chose, in terms of their resulting health outcomes. The visual depiction of the available options and the distributions of their relative desirability is called a decision space visualization (DSV). Prior research on DSVs shows that they have the potential to help shared patient-physician decision-making processes in situations where choices are not obvious and individual differences play a significant role in the decision. The DSV described here was achieved through three phases: developing requirements for the healthcare data that is filtered and displayed by the DSV, designing and developing the DSV application, and assessing the usability of the application in the context of a cancer diagnosis. The DSV detailed in this paper was found to be easy to understand, helpful, and promoted confidence in making treatment decisions.