Should Guidelines Incorporate Evidence on Patient Preferences?

Excerpt

Patient preferences are critically important to clinical decision making and patient care. Few clinicians practicing modern day medicine would argue otherwise. This is the case despite the fact that shared decision making can often be difficult for us to accomplish in our everyday practices.1‐5 Traditional models for incorporating patient preferences into clinical decisions have described the intersection of patient values with clinical evidence and resource considerations at the point-of-decision (Figure 1).6 More recently, there have been calls to move beyond the mere integration of patient preferences at the point-of-decision to the more systematic integration of patient preference data into guidelines themselves.7,8

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