Dual Purpose, Dual Audience: MCDA-Based Tools Can Simultaneously Support Personal Health Decisions and Educate...

In this vision paper we envisage paradigmatic change transforming the health professional from the empowered agent of a dependent patient into the final decision supporter of an empowered person; a person who comes equipped with the preliminary opinion of an apomediative personalised decision support tool and the enhanced health decision literacy it produces. The anomalies in the current paradigm that will produce this change arise from unworkable attempts to combine multicriterial personal preferences and the best available evidence in a medical reasoning model. Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA)-based decision support tools provide one mechanism for achieving this synthesis in a transparent way in a specific case whilst, simultaneously, increasing the generic health decision literacy and competencies of both person and clinician. The educational task for both is less than might be expected because of their familiarity, as consumers, with the many comparison websites and magazines for products and services using an informal version of MCDA. The educational task, particularly for the clinician, is primarily one of acknowledging that MCDA is a decision competence that has the potential, not only to enhance decision quality, but also facilitate communication between person and professional, who will now be talking the same decisional language. Experience from developing the MyBoneHealth tool confirms both the feasibility and challenges of delivering a MCDA-based decision support and educational tool.