Clinicians’ Involvement of Patients in Decision Making. A Video Based Comparison of Their Behavior in Public vs. Private Practice

Background: Little is known about the extent to which Peruvian physicians seek to involve patients in shared decision making, or about the variation in these efforts across different settings. Objective: To measure the extent to which Peruvian clinicians involve their patients in decision making and to explore the differences between clinicians’ behavior in private vs. public practice. Design: Videographic analysis. Participants and Setting: Seven academic physicians who provided care to patients in a public and a private setting participate in this study. All the encounters in both settings were filmed on one random day of February 2012. Approach: Two raters, working independently and in duplicate used the 12-item OPTION scale to quantify the extent of physician effort to involve patients in shared decision making (with 0 indicating no effort and 100 maximum possible effort) in 58 video recordings of usual clinical encounters in private and public practice. Results: The mean OPTION score was 14.3 (SD 7.0). Although the OPTION score in the private setting (mean 16.5, SD 7.3) was higher than in the public setting (mean 12.3 SD 6.1) this difference was not statistically significant (p = .09). Conclusion: Peruvian academic physicians in this convenience sample barely sought to involve their patients in shared decision making. Additional studies are required to confirm these results which suggest that patient-centered care remains an unfulfilled promise and a source of inequity within and across the private and the public sectors in Peru.