Co-led by CTO, a team of patients, researchers, and investigators, as well as people involved in research networks, health charities, and patient organizations developed these tools to build capacity and increase engagement of patients with clinical trials.
Patient-oriented research is about engaging patients, their caregivers, and families as partners in the research process. This engagement helps to ensure that studies focus on patient-identified priorities, which ultimately leads to better patient outcomes.
The tools, called decision aids, are aimed at helping people decide if they are ready to engage with each other as part of a patient-oriented research team. Decision aids are usually tools used by patients and doctors to make treatment decisions together. These decision aids for patient engagement with clinical trials are based on healthcare decision aids and use the same type of format to help make a decision. One tool has been developed for patients and one has been developed for researchers and investigators, these two tools provide similar information, from a different perspective.
Funding for the development and dissemination of the Investigator Decision Aid has been provided by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) (Application #397455) and the Ontario SPOR Support Unit (OSSU).
