Grant: Knowledge Synthesis Grant

Research shows a need to improve the way that health care is delivered so that patients have better results. Efforts to improve health care delivery by influencing the actions of health professionals have had limited impact. Instead, research shows that most patients want to be actively involved in their own care, and helping patients to pursue, make decisions about, and manage their own care can have several benefits. We found more than 600 studies that tested various ways to help patients help themselves for many different health problems. This included information resources, education, counseling, decision making tools, reminders, or access to care coordinators. To identify the best methods we need more information about the way they are designed, and how that is related to their success or failure for patients with different health problems. We propose to search for published research, identify studies that tested ways or tools for patients with cancer or arthritis to help themselves, and describe how the content or format of the tools, or the way they were provided to patients affected the results. In future, researchers and health care professionals can use this information to develop new methods to help patients help themselves, or choose to offer patients the tools or assistance most likely to promote the best health care results.