Grant: Foundation Grant

This research is about helping people make decisions about their health. I want to help people make decisions that (1) are informed by the best available medical evidence and (2) reflect what matters to the person or people affected by the decision. This can be hard to do. One reason it's hard is that it can be difficult to make sense of medical statistics. The statistics may not be very clear, people may not feel confident interpreting statistics, and different ways of presenting statistics feel different. For example, being told you have a 1% chance of having a side effect can feel different than being told you have a 99% chance of everything being fine. Doctors and other health care professionals are influenced by different ways of presenting statistics, too. Even when people understand the statistics, it can still be hard to deal with tradeoffs. Many health decisions require people to choose between competing priorities. For example, people may have to choose between maximizing their quality of life or their length of life. I have figured out ways to address these challenges by designing interactive web applications that help people better understand complicated statistics, sort out what matters to them in tradeoffs, and make decisions by putting medical evidence together with what's important to them. However, there is still work to do. In this research project, I aim to develop new web and mobile tools to help more people make their best health decisions. My team includes patients, doctors, nurses, and others to make sure I take everyone's ideas into account. I will use advanced testing methods to make sure that the tools I develop are helpful and easy to use. Once I am confident that they help people, I will implement my tools in patient portals connected to electronic health records. This will help people across Canada get the information and tools they need to make the best possible health decisions for themselves and their families.