The International Patient Decision Aid Standards (IPDAS) Collaboration is a group of researchers, practitioners and stakeholders from around the world. The IPDAS Collaboration is lead by professors Annette O’Connor in Canada, and Glyn Elwyn in the United Kingdom.

What is the goal of the project?
The goal of the IPDAS Collaboration is to establish an internationally approved set of criteria to determine the quality of patient decision aids. These criteria will be helpful to a wide variety of individuals and organizations that use and/or develop patient decision aids. For example:

• Patients or other individuals who are making a health decision
• Practitioners guiding patients in making health decisions
• Developers of patient decision aids
• Researchers or evaluators of patient decision aids
• Policy makers or payers of patient decision aids

Why are standards needed?
There are over 500 patient decision aids available or being developed by many different individuals and groups around the world. However, people have difficulty knowing whether or not a decision aid is a source of reliable health information that can help in decision making.

What are the results?
The IPDAS Collaboration NEW standards represent the efforts of more than 100 participants from 14 countries around the world. The results of the voting process and new standards for developing and evaluating patient decision aids are now available. The publication is listed below with presentations and supporting documents available under Resources.

The IPDAS Collaboration results have been published:

Glyn Elwyn, Annette O’Connor, Dawn Stacey, Robert Volk, Adrian Edwards, Angela Coulter, Richard Thomson, Alexandra Barratt, Michael Barry, Steven Bernstein, Phyllis Butow, Aileen Clarke, Vikki Entwistle, Deb Feldman-Stewart, Margaret Holmes-Rovner, Hilary Llewellyn-Thomas, Nora Moumjid, Al Mulley, Cornelia Ruland, Karen Sepucha, Alan Sykes, Tim Whelan, on behalf of the International Patient Decision Aids Standards (IPDAS) Collaboration. Developing a quality criteria framework for patient decision aids: online international Delphi consensus process. British Medical Journal. 2006 Aug 26;333(7565):417.

Would you like to join the Evidence Based Shared Decision Making listserv?
To join the Evidence Based Shared Decision Making listserv, please contact Dr. David Rovner at rovner@msu.edu.