The concept of shared decision-making in healthcare is making its way from physician offices into emergency rooms as hospitals look to become more patient-friendly. Mobile apps are helping to accelerate the shift.
A piece in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday examined this trend. “Now, to help patients and families weigh the evidence and compare risks and benefits, hospitals are developing so-called shared decision-making aids tailored to emergency situations,” the Journal said.
The story looked at apps the Mayo Clinic and Nationwide Children’s Hospital have created to assist patients and clinicians in making treatment decisions in the ER.
One, a Mayo app, Chest Pain Choice, was built with input from a patient advisory group. It goes over each patient’s diagnosis, lists treatment options and discusses risks. A paper presented this month at an American College of Cardiology showed that Chest Pain Choice helped reduce unnecessary testing at Mayo, according to the Journal.
Nationwide Children’s, in Columbus, Ohio, has developed an iPad app called the Patient Activation Tool to query young patients and their parents on personal preferences, such as concerns about side effects and the desire to avoid hospitalization. The Journal told the story of a 9-year-old with appendicitis whose family chose antibiotics over immediate surgery.
The child “received intravenous antibiotics in the hospital overnight, went home with an oral prescription and recovered well,” the article said.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
As the Journal noted, the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine has a conference planned in a couple of weeks to discuss this very topic. The organization seeks to develop a research agenda on shared decision-making with patients in the ED. Here’s a video previewing that meeting:
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