Shared decision-making as a cost-containment strategy: US physician reactions from a cross-sectional survey

Objective: To assess US physicians’ attitudes towards using shared decision-making (SDM) to achieve cost containment. Design: Cross-sectional mailed survey. Setting: US medical practice. Participants: 3897 physicians were randomly selected from the AMA Physician Masterfile. Of these, 2556 completed the survey. Main outcome measures: Level of enthusiasm for “Promoting better conversations with patients as a means of lowering healthcare costs”; degree of agreement with “Decision support tools that show costs would be helpful in my practice” and agreement with “should promoting SDM be legislated to control overall healthcare costs”. Results: Of 2556 respondents (response rate (RR) 65%), two-thirds (67%) were ‘very enthusiastic’ about promoting SDM as a means of reducing healthcare costs. Most (70%) agreed decision support tools that show costs would be helpful in their practice, but only 24% agreed with legislating SDM to control costs. Compared with physicians with billing-only compensati...