Discordant Care and Decision Quality: Patients’ Reasons for Not Receiving Their Initial Test of Choice in Colorectal Cancer Screening

Background Concordance between a person’s values and the test or treatment they ultimately receive is widely considered to be an essential outcome for good decision quality. There is little research, however, on why patients receive “discordant†care. A large, randomized trial of decision aids for colorectal cancer (CRC) screening provided an opportunity to assess why some patients received a different test than the one they preferred at an earlier time point. Methods Of 688 patients who participated in the trial, 43 received a different CRC screening test than the one they selected after viewing a decision aid 6 mo prior. These patients answered 2 brief, open-ended questions about the reasons for this discordance. The research team analyzed their answers using qualitative description. Results Patient responses reflected 6 major categories: barriers or risks of initially favored test, benefits of alternative test, costs or health insurance coverage, discussion with family or friends, provider factors or recommendation, and health issues. Conclusions Some of the patients’ explanations fit well with the informed concordance approach, which infers poor decision quality from the existence of discordant care, since in these cases it appears that the patient’s values and preferences were not adequately respected. Other statements suggest that the patient had an informed rationale for changing their mind about which test to undergo. These cases may reflect high-quality decision making, despite the existence of discordance as measured in the trial. This analysis highlights a major challenge to a popular approach for assessing decision quality, the difficulty of normatively assessing the quality of decision making when apparent discordant care has been provided, and the need to assess patient values and preference over time. Highlights Value-choice concordance is an accepted measure for assessing decision quality in decision aid trials, but greater exploration of apparently discordant care challenges key assumptions of this method; this study provides evidence that discordance as typically measured may not always reflect low-quality patient decision making. Researchers evaluating decision aids and assessing decision quality should consider the use of qualitative methods to supplement measures of decision quality and consider assessing patient preferences at multiple time points.