Fostering Shared Decision Making with Health Informatics Interventions Based on the Boosting Framework.

The accumulation of medical knowledge, technology and expertise has provided people with more and more options to improve their health and increase longevity. However, healthcare options typically come with benefits as well as harms and often involve important and complex, high-stakes trade-offs. The ideal of Shared Decision Making (SDM), where a healthcare provider and a patient exchange information, bring in their respective professional and existential expertise and consider the options in light of what matters most from the patient's perspective, is a paradigm that is increasingly viewed as a gold standard for high quality care nowadays. eHealth provides ample opportunities to foster personal health choices and SDM through digital information exchange and personal values clarification support. The boosting framework attempts to describe how to foster people's competences to make choices. Its vision is to equip individuals with competences, for instance improved risk literacy, to empower them to make well-informed choices when facing a difficult choice, such as decisions about health issues. Application of the boosting framework to personal health choices and the SDM process unveils new and promising horizons for future research and could inform the design and evaluation of health informatics interventions such as decision support systems.