Use of Visual Decision Aid for Shared Decision Making in Chest Pain

Chest pain is a common presenting complaint in the Emergency Department (ED). Cardiac testing in low-risk patients poses unnecessary costs and resource utilisation, which may in part be due to clinicians adopting a very-low-risk threshold for discharge without testing.

The Chest Pain Choice (CPC) decision aid is a visual aid that was developed to facilitate shared decision-making between physicians and patients who present to the emergency department with chest pain, and has shown to be effective in increasing patient knowledge and decreasing the rate of admission to an observation unit for cardiac testing, among patients with chest pain who are at low risk for acute coronary syndromes. Shared decision making with the use of this visual aid has been shown in other centres to be associated with greater patient knowledge, greater patient involvement in decision making and less frequent admissions, with no increase in major adverse cardiac events (MACE) due to the intervention.

The visual aid includes a brief description of what tests have been done thus far to assess the patient's risk of MACE, a graphic representation of the risk as calculated based on the HEART score, as well as the evaluation options available. The visual aid has been modified from its original form for the local context in terms of viable options for further evaluation.

This study aims to assess if using a visual decision aid for shared decision making between physician and patient can safely help to decrease unnecessary admissions to the ED observation unit, as well as its impact on patient knowledge, satisfaction, as well as 30-day and 60-day Major Adverse Cardiac Events (MACE).