Would You Use A Syncope SDM Instrument?

Much has been made, off and on, about the chest pain shared decision-making tool rolled out over the past couple years. It turns out, when properly informed of their low risk for subsequent cardiac events, most patients look at you sideways and wonder why anyone was offering them admission in the first place.  Whether that was its intended purpose, or a happy little accident, is a subject of controversy.

Their next target: syncope.

The content of this article is not very profound, other than to show the first step in the process of developing such an SDM instrument. These authors detail their involvement of emergency physicians, cardiologists, and patient stakeholders to inform their iterative design process. In the end, their tool looks a lot like the their chest pain instrument:

Generally speaking, because the approach to low-risk syncope has some of the same issues as low-risk chest pain, I have essentially the same fundamental problems. Much like for chest pain, inpatient evaluations for syncope are generally unrevealing. We probably ought not be admitting most of these patients. Therefore, this SDM instrument is again addressing the problem of low-value resource utilization by shifting the burden of the decision onto the patient, and trying to convince them to make what we already know to be the correct one (go home). That’s not how the Force works.

Then, just like the chest pain tool, this fails to convey the benefit of hospitalization for comparison. In their pictogram, two out of 100 patients suffer an adverse event after fainting. Is admission to the hospital protective against those adverse events – even if a diagnosis is made? The patient needs to receive some simplified visualization of their expected benefit from staying in the hospital, not just simply the base rate for deterioration.

I love shared decision-making. I use it constantly in my practice in situations where the next step in evaluation or treatment has no clearly superior path. Again, I don’t think this reflects the same uncertainty.

“Development of a Patient Decision Aid for Syncope in the Emergency Department: the SynDA tool”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29288554