“Over 85 percent of our major medical guideline recommendations are not based on high-quality evidence,” said Robert Califf, MD, director of the Duke Translational Medicine Institute, in an article I recently wrote for Inside Stanford Medicine.
This was the inconvenient truth that Stanford bioethicist David Magnus, PhD, had to explain to patients during focus groups, as he began developing policy recommendations for conducting ethical comparative-effectiveness research within physician practices.
“We had to dispel the myth that doctors always know which treatments are most effective for individual patients,” Magnus told me. “The truth is, in the absence of good evidence, these choices are often influenced by advertising, insurance coverage and local preferences.”
Gathering better treatment evidence is a key objective of the Affordable Care Act’s health-care reform mandate. It provides incentives for medical practices to continually evaluate the relative effectiveness of competing medical interventions as a way of delivering better, less costly care to more people. The widespread adoption of electronic medical records is enabling researchers to conduct these head-to-head comparisons in more automated ways, reducing the time and expense associated with the highly controlled clinical trials used to evaluate new drugs and devices.
A communications challenge with these new approaches, however, is how to explain the risks and rewards of participation to patients. In focus groups, Magnus found that no meaningful discussions could take place until his research team had educated patients on some fundamental concepts of medical research, such as standards-of-care, randomization and informed consent. To help with this process, his team produced three short, animated videos that would rapidly get everyone up to the same level of understanding. Magnus and his collaborators are making these videos available to all for educational purposes.
The first video, “Which Medication is Best?,” explores the influences and uncertainty associated with physicians’ prescribing preferences. “Research on Medical Practices” explains medical record reviews, study randomization and randomization of clinics and hospitals; and “Informing or Asking” describes ways to explain study participation to patients.
Magnus and his bioethicist collaborators from the Seattle Children’s Research Institute and University of Washington expect to publish their final ethics policy recommendations later this year.
Previously: Bioethicists say criticisms of preemie oxygen study could have “chilling effect” on clinical research; Stanford biomedical ethicist discusses Choosing Wisely Initiative and Will new guidelines lead to massive statin use?
Videos by Booster Shot Media
