In March 2018, the National Quality Forum (NQF) released a guide for healthcare providers, the National Quality Partners PlaybookTM: Shared Decision Making in Healthcare. This recently-released Playbook offers vital guidance for the process of making shared decision making a standard of care for all patients, across settings and conditions.
The National Quality Partners (NQP) Playbook: Shared Decision Making in Healthcare was developed with input from the NQP Shared Decision Making Action Team, including twenty public and private sector experts and stakeholders, holding a variety of positions including patients, clinicians, healthcare organizations, specialty societies, and federal agencies.
This Playbook has something for everyone, offering practical and real-world actions healthcare organizations and providers can take with varying levels of efforts and resources. The actions include educating patients and families about what to expect from providers in the process; advancing healthcare team knowledge and training to foster high-quality shared decision making; applying technology and other investments to help integrate shared decision making into the care delivery process; implementing mechanisms to monitor patient, clinician, and healthcare team engagement in shared decision making; and establishing accountability and incentives for this engagement.
Also included in the Playbook are examples for implementation, possible barriers (with suggested solutions), as well as sample tools and resources applicable across care settings.
The NQP Playbook identifies six different fundamentals to guide shared decision making in health careorganizations:
- Promote leadership and culture;
- Enhance patient education and engagement;
- Provide healthcare team knowledge and training;
- Take concrete actions;
- Track, monitor, and report; and
- Establish accountability.
NQF believes that shared decision making has the potential to become “the standard for informed consent” to “ensure that healthcare decisions reflect patients’ goals and preferences for care.”
“Even though patients have access to more healthcare information than ever before, in reality, they often may not fully understand important (basic) information about the risks and benefits of treatments and alternatives, and even if they do, they often are not given the opportunity by their clinicians to provide meaningful input into their healthcare decisions,” said Maureen Corry, senior advisor for Childbirth Connection programs at the National Partnership for Women & Families, and co-chair of the National Quality Partners™ (NQP) Shared Decision Making Action Team.
“The NQP Playbook provides practical strategies for organizations to strengthen shared decision making, including the use of high-quality, unbiased, and evidence-based tools called patient decision aids,” said Norm Kahn, MD, immediate past executive vice president and chief executive officer for the Council of Medical Specialty Societies and co-chair of the action team. “Shared decision making is critical to person-centered care, and should be standard practice for helping patients learn and make decisions about any healthcare treatment, procedure, or intervention they are considering.”
A summary of the playbook is available here, while the full playbook can be found here.