Involving patients in decisions regarding preventive health interventions using the analytic hierarchy process

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Abstract
Practice guidelines that recommend active patient involvement in decisions about preventive health interventions are becoming increasingly common. These decisions frequently involve difficult trade-offs between competing risks and benefits that require easily accessible information about the expected outcomes, superb doctor-patient communication, and effective integration of objective outcome data with individual values and preferences. Successful implementation of recommendations for shared decision-making in preventive health care will require the development of efficient methods for making these complex decisions in busy practice settings. This article describes how the analytic hierarchy process, a multiple criteria decision-making method, could facilitate successful implementation of shared decision-making regarding preventive health care in clinical practice. The method is illustrated using recent guidelines for colorectal cancer screening for average risk patients issued by the American Gastroenterological Association.