Enhancing Doctor-Patient Shared Decision-Making: Design of a Novel Collaborative Decision Description Language

Effective shared decision-making between patients and physicians is crucial for enhancing health care quality and reducing medical errors. The literature shows that the absence of effective methods to facilitate shared decision-making can result in poor patient engagement and unfavorable decision outcomes.

In this paper, we propose a Collaborative Decision Description Language (CoDeL) to model shared decision-making between patients and physicians, offering a theoretical foundation for studying various shared decision scenarios.

CoDeL is based on an extension of the interaction protocol language of Lightweight Social Calculus. The language utilizes speech acts to represent the attitudes of shared decision-makers toward decision propositions, as well as their semantic relationships within dialogues. It supports interactive argumentation among decision makers by embedding clinical evidence into each segment of decision protocols. Furthermore, CoDeL enables personalized decision-making, allowing for the demonstration of characteristics such as persistence, critical thinking, and openness.

The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated through a case study of shared decision-making in the disease domain of atrial fibrillation. Our experimental results show that integrating the proposed language with GPT can further enhance its capabilities in interactive decision-making, improving interpretability.

The proposed novel CoDeL can enhance doctor-patient shared decision-making in a rational, personalized, and interpretable manner.