The Evidence of Effects Page: Refinement of a tool for optimising evidence-based informed treatment decisions In Clinical practice (The EEPIC-1 study)

Today there is more and better evidence about medical treatments. Despite this, evidence is poorly applied in clinical practice. In addition, when making decisions around treatment choices, patients may want to know not only what treatment is the most effective but also the safest and in certain health care settings, the most affordable.

Providing all the information needed when making decisions around health care is difficult and often we end up with huge documents that are difficult to access. Some attempts have been made to address this in the form of evidence summaries. Many of them provide a useful summary of how well treatments work. However, they all miss out some of the key additional information needed to help make decisions and they are often still too long. For example, a summary should be one-page where possible but we have not come across such a summary.

We are therefore applying for funding to support refinement of a unique evidence summary tool that we have developed. The 'Evidence of Effects Page' (EEP) is a one-page summary that presents the evidence for treatment effects and uniquely incorporates additional key information related to treatment decisions such as quality of the evidence, cost of individual treatments and adverse effects.

We will ask patients and doctors their opinions of the EEP to find out what elements they find useful and those they would modify or like to be included. In addition, we will use an eye-tracking study to assess how easy patients and doctors can access key information from the EEP and compare this to other summaries of evidence. This will allow us to modify and refine the EEP to match with what patients and doctors would like. We can then use the refined EEP to test whether it works in clinical practice.

Amount awarded: £37,689