: The Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM) dedicates its efforts to promoting rigorous, scientific evaluations of health care decisions and health care policy initiatives. For over a quarter century, it has been on the cutting edge in developing and studying decision support tools to improve the quality of patient care. While these tools have been reported in medical journals and employed in numerous health care settings, several barriers have limited their more widespread adoption and use for real-time decision making. In addition, the recent proliferation of patient decision aids and their use by a wide range of consumers, researchers and policy-makers makes standardized evaluation of their quality and theoretically motivated research in medical decision making ever more crucial. To address these issues, the theme of this year's annual meeting is Better Decisions, Better Care: Advancing Decision Support to Improve Health Care. The Society's Annual Meeting features current research in a rich cross-section of disciplines including decision analysis, shared decision making, evidence based medicine, cost-effectiveness analysis, health economics, meta-analysis, computational methods, decision psychology, and medical ethics. In this grant, we seek support for 2 symposia, a workshop, and 4 short courses. Symposium #1, Real-time Clinical Decision Support to Improve Quality of Care, will feature government and private sector representatives and focus on federal plans for a national health information network, the role of real-time clinical decision support, and research opportunities in this area. It will be followed by a workshop designed to focus SMDM's research agenda in the field, bringing together expertise and interested parties from public and private sectors along with a multidisciplinary membership of scholars in medical informatics, psychology, health economics, and health care and outcomes research. Our dinner symposium, Improving Patient Decision-aids by Establishing State-of-the-art Standards for Content: The IPDAS Project, will feature experts in decision aid development, evaluation and implementation, and will provide participants with an opportunity to evaluate decision aids in a wide range of health areas, using a set of standards that is being developed by an international collaboration. The Short Courses will help attendees acquire skills related to the conference theme. The dates for this Annual Meeting are October 14-18, 2006. Summaries of the symposia will be published in the Society's newsletter and disseminated through the Society's website. Furthermore, the Editor of the journal Medical Decision Making has enthusiastically agreed to publish the proceedings from the conference as a special issue, if funding can be obtained. We anticipate that the proposed program can make major strides toward disseminating research to date and showing ways evidence can be applied to real time decision-making by patients, physicians, and members of the health care team working together. This is a venue in which strong intellectual challenges to the status quo can engage the best researchers in the field.
