A Novel Patient Decision Aid for Surgical Treatment Options in Early-Stage Breast Cancer

Monitor the recruitment process of eligible patients. Including tracking how many patients are approached, how many participate and how effective the decision aid engages patient in the decision making process. High participation and engagement indicates a successful implementation. Compare clinician reported length of encounter between interventions as a balancing measure.

Use the validated and accepted Ottawa Decision Aid metrics to assess decision quality, decisional conflict, acceptability, and regret. Conduct semi-structured interviews to gather additional qualitative data regarding the patient experience, and use feedback to modify and improve the content and design of the Decision Aid.

Optimal timing and mode of delivery will be determined by the engagement of patients with the decision aid (DA) based on the time the DA was offered. Qualitative feedback from semi-structured interviews will provide additional context for engagement with paper versus digital copies, and engagement prior to versus after meeting with the surgeon.

Patient-reported Decision Aid Acceptability, Decision Quality, Self Efficacy, Decision Conflict, and Decision Regret (from the Ottawa Decision Aid Measures) as well as Patient-reported distress will be compared between intervention groups. Differences in these key outcomes will be used to perform a power analysis to determine optimal enrollment size for a large scale multicenter randomized controlled trial.