The following is a guest post from Dorothy Jeffress, Executive Director of the Center for Advancing Health, an IxAction Alliance member.

It is an exciting time for those who support information therapy (Ix).  It seems that current health policy/reform discussions on Capitol Hill and around the Beltway are frequently touching on the need to incorporate strategies for enhanced patient engagement through targeted health information and integration of shared decision aids for example. But much of the future success of these new policies lies ultimately in the hands of consumers.  So as forward thinking as requirements for meaningful use in HIT roll-out might be, all of this recent rhetoric seems to overlook the fact that few consumers currently make use of available tools for selecting health plans, hospitals or physicians.   In fact at the Center for Advancing Health, we have noticed that few consumers are actually crying out for the responsibility of making more decisions about their health and health care.

Why do so many of us abandon the familiar role of savvy consumer when making decisions about our health care, and instead choose our health plan on the basis of its ads or the hospital recommended by the woman behind us in the 7-11 checkout line?

This question is the basis of a research report called “Getting Tools Used” issued in June by the Center for Advancing Health.  The aim was to learn from successful decision support tools outside of health care how to increase people’s use of tools to make decisions within health care.  Detailed case studies of four successful non-health-related tools were developed: Consumer Reports: Car Buying Guide; eBay; US News & World Report: America’s Best Colleges, and the FDA’s federally mandated Nutrition Facts Panels (NFP).  Five experts in health-related decision aids commented on the keys to their success and the implications for tools relevant to choices in health care.

The findings were clear:

• The successful tools all come from a trustworthy, objective source
• Their content is tailored to the interests of the audience
• Each tool is targeted to the users’ capabilities
• All of them are highly visible and readily available nationwide.

Implications of these findings for sponsors of health care decision aids can be found on the CFAH Website. For the rest of us, however, the critical issue is this:  Our indifference to health-related decision aids is not trivial.  Health care has never been more complicated.  We are more responsible for making more decisions about our care than ever before.  And the stakes of our decisions have never been so high.  But there is simply no way we can make well informed decisions without relying on objective information that is arrayed so that we can understand and weigh the trade-offs of our options.  Increasingly, being able to find safe, decent health care depends on our ability to locate trustworthy tools when we need them — and then to use them to help us make the choices that meet our needs and preferences.

We need better tools, yes.  But we also must recognize that to realize their benefit, we have to use them.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 11:18 am and is filed under Behavior Change, Decision Support, Engaging Consumers, Health Care Reform, Inside the Beltway. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.