Helping patients make informed healthcare decisions

Compared with usual care, across a wide variety of decisions, patient decision aids likely resulted in better congruence between participants’ informed values for features of options and the choice made(there was moderate-certainty evidence that they helped more adults choose an option that reflected what was most important to them).

Patient decision aids also resulted in large increases in knowledge, accurate risk perceptions and increased participation in decision-making. There was reduced decisional conflict for subscales of feeling uninformed and having unclear personal values.

Consultations were no longer in duration when patient decision aids were used in preparation for the consultation, and they were only 1.5 minutes longer when decision aids were used during the consultation.