Supporting informed decision making when clinical evidence and conventional wisdom collide: papers developed from the Eisenberg Center Conference Series 2012

Robert J Volk,Richard Street,Michael Fordis,Quentin Smith

doi:10.1186/1472-6947-13-s3-s1

Abstract

AHRQ involvement in exploring issues that impact clinical decision making The AHRQ Effective Health Care (EHC) Program was created in 2003 under the legislative provisions of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act (MMA). The EHC Program supports individual researchers, research centers, and academic organizations working together with AHRQ to produce effectiveness and comparative effectiveness research for various audiences (http://www.effectivehealthcare.ahrq.gov). The EHC Program does this through: 1) reviewing and synthesizing published and unpublished scientific evidence; 2) generating new scientific evidence and analytic tools; and 3) compiling research findings that are synthesized and/or generated and translating these materials into useful formats for clinicians, consumers, and policymakers. Much of the work focusing on translation and dissemination of research findings is done through the John M. Eisenberg Center for Clinical Decisions and Communications Science (the Eisenberg Center), a specialized Center within the EHC Program charged with working in concert with other EHC Program components to organize research results into summaries and other tools that are useful to clinicians, healthcare policy makers, and patients. An important function of the Eisenberg Center involves planning and implementing the Eisenberg Conference Series. This series brings together experts in health communication, health literacy, shared decisionmaking, and related fields to produce white papers (and stakeholder commentaries) that explore developments and advances in the fields of clinical decisionmaking and health communication. The papers from the 2012 Conference Series are assembled here as a supplement in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making.

Highlights

AHRQ involvement in exploring issues that impact clinical decision making The AHRQ Effective Health Care (EHC) Program was created in 2003 under the legislative provisions of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act (MMA)
Conventional wisdom and evidence in clinical decision making as a theme While reference to “conventional wisdom” dates into the mid-nineteenth century, the term was popularized by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who stated in his book, The Affluent Society, published originally in 1958 and re-issued periodically, including the 40th anniversary version cited here, “It will be convenient to have a name for the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability, and it should be a term that emphasizes this predictability
Krumholz in an editorial for Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes opens in an editorial titled Questioning Conventional Wisdom that “In science, what seems obvious may not be true, and what is accepted as conventional wisdom, may sometimes be based on flawed assumptions” ([2] p.59)