Encounter tools: Interventions to engage people in decision making

The knowledge base for shared decision making (SDM) is incomplete in many clinical areas. To fill the gaps in the long term, we need new methods of generating patient-centred research. But to make best use of already available knowledge, there is an urgent need for better, quicker, and more comprehensive forms of evidence synthesis and updating. Implementation science and technology innovation can further enhance the dissemination of current best evidence, in ways and formats that are tailored to all different end-users and contexts: clinicians alone, patients alone, or clinicians and patients together in the clinical encounter. This chapter describes the progress being made in considering how to potentially automate the process of evidence synthesis, and after that, lead to the development of different types of knowledge tools that would be useful for clinical practice settings