Jeff Belkora and colleagues are engaged in various projects to implement and evaluate programs that promote patient participation in medical decisions. These are sponsored by the government and non-profit foundations, as well as generous philanthropic donors.
Ongoing projects include:
- Implementation and evaluation of decision support at the UCSF Breast Care Center, as well as testing measures of decision quality (Funder: Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making)
- Community-based research with the Mendocino Cancer Resource Center evaluating decision support among rural, underserved patients, including Latinas and Native Americans, in North Coast counties of California. (Funder: California Breast Cancer Research Program)
- Promoting consideration of clinical trials through BreastCancerTrials.org, a not-for-profit online service that makes it easier and faster for people affected by breast cancer to find clinical trials that might be right for them. It features easy-to-read trial summaries, a convenient and secure way for users to share their online health history with research sites, and a trial alert service that notifies users of recently added trials (Funder: Safeway Foundation).
- Implementing and evaluating decision support at The Cancer Support Community, in several projects including one with the Education Network to Advance Cancer Clinical Trials (Funders include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)
- Implementing decision support by students at UCSF, Touro, and Dartmouth medical centers as part of the Patient Support Corps (Funders include the University of California Center for Healthcare Quality Improvement, Touro, and Dartmouth.)
- Evaluating decision and communication aids in the context of patients considering hip and knee surgery. (Funder: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation).
- Inventing new approaches to care that increase quality at reduced cost as part of Stanford's Clinical Excellence Research Center.
- Implementing and evaluating decision support at The Edinburgh Cancer Centre in Scotland (Funder: Cancer Research UK).
- Quality research on the delivery of cancer care at Palo Alto Medical Foundation.
- Training and technical assistance for Breast Cancer Connections.
- Development of an online question bank (funder: Wells Fargo).