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NOTE: This DF Method is in development. See also below.

Decision Free Healthcare is a method to make it transparent to patients they are offered the treatment best aligned with their personal aims. Without the need for decisions, and thus without the stress that comes with decision making.

Healthcare is often an acute life-saving service where “decision making” should be read as an expert caregiver making the best possible choices based on his/her expertise.

In less acute situations there may be several treatment options (including not treating at all). In the past the treating professional would assess which treatment to provide and the patient was merely a passive bystander. This situation is gradually changing.

One popular approach is “shared decision making”, where the patient is to make the choice together with the professional caregiver, usually after receiving a lot of information. As the patient is not a medical expert, the patient has only limited ways of being certain what the best treatment actually is. Shared decision making irresponsibly shifts responsibility towards the patient, which often causes the patient stress and without any guarantee the treatment path agreed upon is also the best one for the patient.

Decision Free Healthcare uses the following four step approach:

• Define the patient’s desired outcome (e.g. functionality, quality of life, duration of healing process) within the patient’s context
• The patient identifies the caregiver (if there are more) with the most relevant expertise (not the same as experience!) to achieve the desired outcome.
• The identified caregiver clarifies to the patient how, using what treatment, the desired outcome is most likely to be achieved (clarification is only completed once the patient indicates everything is transparent to him/her).
• Following clarification, with the approval of the patient, the treatment commences.

DF Healthcare lets the expert be an expert and the patient be patient. It ensures that it is transparent to the patient that the treatment is aimed at achieved the patient’s desired outcome.

Decision Free Solutions is currently developing this method and would like to get in contact with any part interested in:

• Assistance with the formal formulation of the method, which focuses on interactions between caregivers and patients in those situations where there is a choice to be made (the method works towards the patient not having to choose but merely approve the treatment as proposed by the expert caregiver).
• Running the method of DF Healthcare.
• Compare the levels of stress and satisfaction (confidence) as experienced by the patients using DF Healthcare versus the different implementations of “shared decision making”.

Interested?