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Elizabeth Murray a Department of
Primary Care and Population Sciences, Royal Free and University College
Medical School, University College London, London N19 3UA, b Picker
Institute Europe, Oxford OX1 1RX, c Health Economics Research
Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 7LF Correspondence to: E Murray elizabeth.murray{at}pcps.ucl.ac.uk
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Abstract |
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Objective:
To determine whether a decision aid on
hormone replacement therapy influences decision making and health outcomes.
Design:
Randomised controlled trial.
Setting:
26 general practices in the United Kingdom.
Participants:
205 women considering hormone
replacement therapy.
Intervention:
Patients' decision aid consisting of an
interactive multimedia programme with booklet and printed summary.
Outcome measures:
Patients' and general
practitioners' perceptions of who made the decision, decisional
conflict, treatment choice, menopausal symptoms, costs, anxiety, and
general health status.
Results:
Both patients and general practitioners found the decision aid acceptable. At three months, mean scores for decisional conflict were significantly lower in the intervention group
than in the control group (2.5 v 2.8; mean difference
0.3, 95% confidence interval
0.5 to
0.2); this difference was
maintained during follow up. A higher proportion of general
practitioners perceived that treatment decisions had been made
"mainly or only" by the patient in the intervention group than in
the control group (55% v 31%; 24%, 8% to 40%). At three
months a lower proportion of women in the intervention group than in
the control group were undecided about treatment (14% v
26%;
12%,
23% to
0.4%), and a higher proportion had
decided against hormone replacement therapy (46% v 32%;
14%, 1% to 28%); these differences were no longer apparent by nine
months. No differences were found between the groups for anxiety, use
of health service resources, general health status, or utility. The
higher costs of the intervention were largely due to the video disc
technology used.
Conclusions:
An interactive multimedia decision aid in the NHS would be popular with patients, reduce decisional conflict, and
let patients play a more active part in decision making without increasing anxiety. The use of web based technology would reduce the
cost of the intervention.
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What is already known on this topic
What this study adds
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Introduction |
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Decision aids to assist patients in deciding about health care have been welcomed as one solution for improving doctor-patient communication, providing information for patients, and addressing the shortcomings in much of the information available.1-5 Both patient outcomes and the rational use of health service resources may be improved by better provision of information.6-9
Decision aids for patients differ from simple information packages. As well as containing information about the probability of risks and benefits of available treatments, they often contain exercises to help patients clarify their own health needs, and they emphasise that different patients reach different decisions.10 Decision aids aim to promote shared decision making,11 where the clinician and patient jointly negotiate and agree on a treatment decision, taking into account both the probability of a range of clinical outcomes and the relative weight the patient places on these outcomes.
A recent systematic review of decision aids determined that they improve patients' knowledge of their condition and treatment options.12 They seem to help with decision making in that "decisional conflict scores" (a measure of patients' internal perceptions of ability to make a decision and satisfaction with the decision made) tend to be lower in groups that have used a decision aid than in control groups.13 There are, however, several unanswered questions,14 in particular the impact of decision aids on choice of treatment, satisfaction, health status, and persistence with treatment. Additionally, as most trials have been done in secondary care in the United States, there is little evidence on the use of decision aids in primary care. Few data are also available on clinicians' perceptions of decision aids or their cost effectiveness. We address these questions here and in the accompanying paper on patients with benign prostatic hypertrophy.15 The two trials were designed to complement each other by examining qualitatively different decisions in different populations (table 1). In this paper we aimed to determine whether an interactive multimedia decision aid promoted greater patient involvement in decision making and what influence this had on the uptake of hormone replacement therapy, health status, and anxiety. We also aimed to determine the acceptability of such a system to patients and general practitioners and the impact on a general practitioner's workload and to undertake an economic analysis.
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Participants and methods |
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Patient recruitment
We invited general practitioners in two urban (Oxford and London)
areas and one suburban (Harrow) and one semirural (Thame and the
Chilterns) area to participate in our study. We asked participating
general practitioners to recruit perimenopausal or menopausal women who
were facing a decision about whether to start, stop, or continue with
hormone replacement therapy. The women needed a sufficient
understanding of English to be able to consult without an interpreter.
Women were excluded if there was an absolute indication or
contraindication to hormone replacement therapy or if they had breast
or pelvic cancer, severe visual or hearing impairment, or severe
learning difficulties or mental illness. Ethical approval was obtained
from local research ethics committees.
Intervention
The intervention, developed by the Foundation for Informed Medical
Decision Making, comprised an interactive multimedia programme, with
booklet and printed summary.16 Information comprised
quantified probabilities of the risks and benefits of hormone
replacement therapy taken from systematic reviews and other published
data available in 1996 and updated in 1998. Topics discussed were
menopausal symptoms, mood changes, skin changes, changes in energy,
vaginal dryness, changes in libido, heart disease, osteoporosis, breast
cancer, and endometrial cancer. After viewing the programme the
patients were given a summary of the information; a copy was also sent
to their general practitioners.
Randomisation
Patients randomised to the control group received normal clinical
care. Randomisation was performed after obtaining informed consent and
baseline data from eligible patients. The randomisation schedule,
stratified according to recruitment centre, was generated by computer.
Allocations were sealed in opaque numbered envelopes, opened by the
study nurse after collection of the baseline data.
Data collection
We collected data from the patients at baseline and at three and
nine months after randomisation. Outcome measures included personal
details, decisional conflict scores, patients' and general
practitioners' perceptions of who made the decision, treatment
preference, persistence with treatment, anxiety (Spielberger state
trait anxiety inventory short form),17 health status and limitations in physical functioning (SF-36),18 health
states and valuation of health states (EQ-5D),19 and
menopausal symptoms (MenQol).20 Patients in the
intervention group completed a questionnaire immediately after viewing
the programme.
Economic evaluation
We recorded the resources used by each patient over the trial
period. These were the cost of providing the interactive information
(video costs, nurse time, and accommodation were shared with the
accompanying trial, with 64% of costs attributed to the present study
on the basis of patient numbers), the number and duration of
consultations with the general practitioner, the number of referrals to
specialists, and the use of hormone replacement therapy and related
drugs. The unit costs were attached to resource volumes to obtain a
total cost per patient. As the technology we used was superseded by CD
Rom, personal computer, and internet technology by the time our trial
was completed, we also present some estimates of the costs of an
alternative delivery system. Utility was measured with the EQ-5D at
baseline and at three and nine months. Valuations of health states were
taken from the UK population tariff.21 We compared point
values, summed values over the trial, and changes from baseline to the
end of the trial. We conducted our economic evaluation from the
perspective of the healthcare system. All costs are in pounds sterling
at 1999 prices. To aid generalisability of the results we obtained unit
costs from national sources where possible (table
2).
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Sample size
Evidence has shown that the more information women have about
hormone replacement therapy, the greater is the likelihood of their
using it.22 We therefore hypothesised that more women in
the intervention group than in the control group would choose hormone
replacement therapy. Allowing for a 30% dropout rate, 120 women in
each arm (84 women completing the trial) would give our study an 80%
power of detecting a 15% point difference in use of hormone
replacement therapy (between 8% and 23%)23 in the two
arms at the 5% significance level. A retrospective calculation showed
that the power of our actual sample size to determine the observed
difference in decisional conflict score between the two groups at the
final assessment was 95% at the 5% significance level.
Statistical analysis
We analysed data for all outcomes for those patients who completed
all the assessments. We also performed an intention to treat analysis
to allow for those patients who did not complete the study and who were
therefore unable to provide data at the nine months' assessment. For
that analysis we assumed no change in score on any outcome from the
beginning of the study, and we substituted baseline data for the
missing data at the final assessment. We present the results for those
who completed the nine months' assessment, as the intention to treat
analysis did not alter the results.
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Results |
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Recruitment
Overall, 26 general practices agreed to participate; 12 from
London and Harrow, 14 from Oxford and Thame and the Chilterns. Between
October 1996 and August 1998, 205 women were recruited (figure).
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Baseline characteristics
The intervention and control groups were comparable at baseline
(table 3) except for educational achievement, which was higher in the
control group. Subsequent analysis showed that educational attainment
was not related to use of hormone replacement therapy nor was there an
interaction between educational attainment and the
intervention.
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Reactions to decision aid
Patients reacted positively to the decision aid (table 4). Women
in the intervention group seemed to make a more definite choice about
treatment than those in the control group, with fewer women being
"undecided" and more women deciding not to take hormone replacement
therapy at three months; by nine months, however, this difference was
no longer significant (table 5). This was confirmed by the decisional
conflict scores, which were lower in the intervention group than in the
control group at three months (table 6); the significant differences
persisted at nine months (total score at nine months: mean (SD) scores, intervention group 2.45 (0.56), control group 2.80 (0.61); mean difference
0.35, 95% confidence interval for mean difference
0.53 to
0.16). General practitioners perceived the decision to
have been made "mainly or only [by the] patient" in a
significantly higher proportion of patients in the intervention group
than in the control group, although there were no differences in
patients' perceptions of who should make the decision (table 7). The
wording of the question was altered from "who made the treatment
decision" (asked in the study on benign prostatic hypertrophy) to
"who do you think should make the treatment decision?" as we
postulated that many women would not have made a decision about their
treatment by the end of the
trial.
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2.15,
6.45 to 2.16). We also
found no significant changes in scores from baseline to final
assessment between the two groups in the SF-36 or the EQ-5D or MenQol.
Of 73 subsequent consultations, the general practitioners said that the
decision aid helped in 61 (84%), made no difference in 11, and
hindered one.
Economic analysis
Table 8 shows the resources used and the costs per patient by
allocation group. No significant differences were detected when the
cost of the trial technology was excluded. When the cost of the video
intervention was included, the cost per patient was £306 in the
intervention group and £91 in the control group over nine months
(P<0.001).
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Discussion |
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Our pair of trials are the first randomised controlled trials of interactive multimedia decision aids in a primary care population in the United Kingdom. The decision aid in this paper was acceptable to both the patients and their general practitioners. It enhanced the women's understanding of the effects of hormone replacement therapy and seemed to reduce decisional conflict for the duration of follow up. Lower decisional conflict scores imply less uncertainty about the decision. At three months fewer women in the intervention group than in the control group were undecided about their use of hormone replacement therapy. The general practitioners perceived a higher proportion of patients in the intervention group than in the control group to have "mainly or only" made the decision, although this finding must be interpreted with caution as the doctors were not blinded to the patients' study groups. The intervention made no difference to the rate of uptake of hormone replacement therapy or the use of health service resources in general. The main costs of the intervention were due to the technology used. These findings are compatible with the recent systematic review of decision aids5 and provide new information on the acceptability of such decision aids to clinicians and patients in primary care and the impact on costs to the NHS.
Implications for the NHS
Public demand for improved access to quality sources of
information is high and likely to increase. Decision aids have the
potential to alter the use of healthcare resources in line with
patients' preferences and, through the influence of patient choice on
clinicians, may help to promote evidence based practice.24
No study has yet examined the effect of decision aids on litigation,
although viewing such a programme could be considered evidence of
informed consent.
Conclusions
Evidence shows that further coordinated investment is required in
decision aids for patients. This would involve incorporation of
information from systematic reviews (where available) into high quality
decision aids, particularly addressing decisions where patients' needs
are paramount.
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Acknowledgments |
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We thank Jo Burns for administrative support, the research staff Liz Redfern, Sue Davis, Jean Catterson, and Marjorie Talbot, and the general practitioners. AH is currently based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London WC1E 7HT.
Contributors: AC and AH developed the idea for the study, participated in the design of the trial, and helped write the paper. AG initiated the health economic component of the study, determined the health economic data to be collected, participated in the analysis, and helped write the paper. HD coordinated the project, collected the data, participated in the analysis, and helped write the paper. SST participated in the study design and analysis of the data and helped write the paper. EM, the principal investigator, participated in the research design, coordinated the project, participated in data analysis, and helped write the paper; she will act as guarantor for the paper.
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Footnotes |
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Funding: BUPA Foundation and the King's Fund.
Competing interests: None declared.
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References |
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(Accepted 6 April 2001)
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