Shared Decision-Making in Older Persons with Cardiovascular Disease

Shared decision-making (SDM) promotes patient-centered care by fostering partnerships between clinicians and patients that ensure that clinical decisions reflect the patient’s goals, values, and preferences. Shared decision-making is particularly important when treatments involve trade-offs that can be considered differently by individual patients. These trade-offs are often present for older adults with cardiovascular disease, who face an array of potential health care decisions relating to medication treatment, revascularization procedures, valve replacement, and device-based therapies. Given the importance of SDM in this population, we review the state of the science of SDM for these patients. We pay particular attention to recent developments in the field, including the design and testing of new patient decision aids. We note that only a few decision aids have been tested in older patients, highlighting an important area for future investigation. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media New York.