A skills network approach to physicians' competence in shared decision making

BACKGROUND: Measurement of physicians' competence in shared decision making (SDM) remains challenging with frequent disagreement between assessment methods.

OBJECTIVE: To conceptualize and measure physicians' SDM competence as an organized network of behavioural skills and to determine whether processing patient-reported data according to this model can be used to predict observer-rated competence.

DESIGN: Secondary analysis of an observational study.

SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: Primary and specialty outpatient care physicians and consecutively recruited adult patients with a chronic condition who faced a treatment decision with multiple acceptable choices.

MEASURES: Network parameters constructed from patients' assessment of physicians' SDM skills as measured by the 9-item Shared Decision Making Questionnaire (SDM-Q-9) and observer-rated SDM competence of physicians measured by three widely used observer-rated instruments.

RESULTS: 29 physicians (12 female, 17 male; mean age 50.3 years) recruited 310 patients (59.4% female, 40.6% male; mean age 54.0 years) facing a decision mainly regarding type 2 diabetes (36.4%), chronic back pain (32.8%) or depressive disorder (26.8%). Although most investigated skills were interrelated, elicitation of the patient's treatment preferences showed the strongest associations with the other skills. Network parameters of this skill were also decisive in predicting observer-rated competence. Correlation between predicted competence scores and observer-rated measurements ranged from 0.710 to 0.785.

CONCLUSIONS: Conceptualizing physicians' SDM competence as a network of interacting skills enables the measurement of observer-rated competence using patient-reported data. In addition to theoretical implications for defining and training medical competences, the findings open a new way to measure physicians' SDM competence under routine conditions.