Presentation Abstract

Title — Evidence-Based Interventions To Promote Patient-Provider Decision Making in Diverse Populations: Examples from Decision Support for Colon Cancer Screening

Current evidence suggests that patients do not frequently receive high-quality, evidence-based information about preventive care, including colon cancer screening.  Colon cancer screening is underutilized despite strong evidence of efficacy, and most patients in the US are not offered options for how to be screened. Patients with low educational attainment, low income, lack of health insurance, and lack of a regular source of care have lower rates of screening and may be particularly at risk for poor decision-making processes.

Decision aids can help patients recognize they have a decision, understand their options, and consider how their personal values can be integrated into the decision about screening. In this presentation, we will examine how decision aids can improve decision making processes and how design of such interventions can help reach diverse populations. We will review evidence from a series of randomized trials conducted by our research team in settings with high proportions of vulnerable patients, and examine techniques for implementation of decision support that can increase reach and efficacy, including the use of mailed or emailed delivery of decision support, text-based reminders, and patient navigators. We will show that these interventions are similarly effective in diverse populations.

About Dr. Pignone

Michael Pignone is Chair in the Department of Internal Medicine at The University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School. His main areas of interest include heart disease prevention and cancer screening.

Dr. Pignone’s research has focused on chronic disease screening, prevention, and treatment, and on improving medical decision making. He has developed and tested interventions, including decision aids, to mitigate literacy-related health disparities and to improve the use of appropriate preventive services.  Dr. Pignone has published over 250 peer-reviewed journal articles and has over 15 years of mentoring students, fellows, and junior faculty in developing their own research agendas, obtaining funding, and publishing collaboratively in top-tiered scholarly journals.

Dr. Pignone did not disclose any conflicts of interest for this workshop.