Verification, decision support & scope
Methodology
How Values in Care separates values clarification from clinical evidence, distinguishes lightweight preparation tools from true patient decision aids, and keeps worldview context from becoming an assumption about a person.
What the Decision Guide is built on
The shared decision-making and decision-aid literature shaped how the guide is structured. Those sources do not validate Values in Care. That would take its own study.
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Checked 2026-08-31
The SHARE Approach
Shared decision-making model: make the choice visible, compare options, elicit values and preferences, decide together, and revisit.
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Checked 2026-08-31
About Shared Decision Making
Defines shared decision making as evidence-informed collaboration that includes goals, preferences, circumstances, family, and caregivers.
Cochrane
Checked 2026-08-31
Decision aids for people facing health treatment or screening decisions
2024 systematic review across 209 studies and 71 decisions; supports knowledge, risk understanding, participation, and values-congruent choices.
IPDAS Collaboration
Checked 2026-08-31
International Patient Decision Aid Standards
Quality framework for tools that claim to be patient decision aids, including options, outcomes, evidence, values clarification, and development quality.
NICE
Checked 2026-08-31
Shared decision making (NG197)
Operational guidance for shared decision making, communication of benefits and harms, and attention to individual preferences and circumstances.
Ottawa Hospital Research Institute
Checked 2026-08-31
Ottawa Decision Support Framework
Framework for decisional needs, decision support, and decision quality; useful as a conceptual reference without implying validation of Values in Care tools.
Why every tool carries a label
An interactive page is not automatically a decision aid.
Educational reference
Explains a topic or evidence base. It does not personalize a recommendation.
Values clarification tool
Helps a person surface priorities and context. It does not infer preferences from identity or produce a clinical recommendation.
Conversation preparation
Helps organize concerns and questions for a visit, family meeting, or care-team discussion.
Decision guide
Structures a choice, priorities, uncertainties, and questions. Generic guides do not substitute for condition-specific evidence.
Patient decision aid
Reserved for a specific healthcare choice only when options, benefits, harms, probabilities where appropriate, evidence provenance, values clarification, and review meet the relevant quality standard.
What a module must meet before it is published
- 1.Define the actual decision or care question and the intended population.
- 2.State what the module does and does not cover, including excluded or urgent situations.
- 3.Describe reasonable options when the content is presented as option-comparison support; include waiting or no change when clinically appropriate.
- 4.Link benefits, harms, burdens, probabilities, and uncertainties to appropriate evidence rather than generating them from a generic values template.
- 5.Separate clinical facts from user-entered values, worries, assumptions, and questions.
- 6.Include values-clarification prompts without implying that one value is morally superior or that a numeric score determines the correct option.
- 7.Record source provenance, evidence search or verification date, review date, reviewer role when genuine review has occurred, and unresolved uncertainty.
- 8.Use plain language, accessible interaction design, keyboard support, and appropriate risk communication.
- 9.Fail closed on missing evidence or required review metadata: omit or label the content rather than fill the gap with plausible language.
The source has to match the claim
Different kinds of claim take different kinds of source. They are not ranked on one ladder.
Clinical facts and outcomes
Prefer current clinical guidelines, systematic reviews, peer-reviewed primary research, government or regulatory sources, and established professional bodies appropriate to the claim. Source strength must match the claim strength.
Shared decision-making structure
Use established shared decision-making and patient decision-aid frameworks to shape the process of deliberation, while avoiding claims that Values in Care tools themselves are validated unless they have actually undergone appropriate development and evaluation.
Faith and worldview
Use appropriately qualified tradition-specific sources for tradition-specific claims. Interfaith umbrella organizations can inform pluralism, dialogue, or shared-ethic framing but should not be treated as the clinical authority for individual traditions.
Culture, disability, family, and lived context
Group-level evidence never becomes an assumption about one person. What the person says comes first.
Faith, culture, and worldview
You are asked whether this context matters to you before any is shown.
- Ask whether faith, spirituality, culture, philosophy, or ethical commitments matter before showing tradition-specific material.
- Never infer a treatment preference from a religious, cultural, racial, ethnic, disability, gender, or other identity label.
- Use a tradition's own authoritative or appropriately qualified sources for tradition-specific claims; umbrella interfaith bodies may provide pluralism or shared-ethic context, not clinical rulings for individual traditions.
- Listing, citing, or discussing an organization does not imply affiliation, endorsement, review, sponsorship, or partnership.
- Represent meaningful intra-tradition diversity and uncertainty rather than flattening a tradition into a single rule.
The Parliament of the World's Religions and other interfaith bodies may be cited as public sources for pluralism, dialogue, or shared-ethic context. Their inclusion does not indicate a current relationship with Values in Care. No affiliation, endorsement, sponsorship, review, or partnership should be inferred unless explicitly documented after it exists.
How a claim gets published
1. Finding candidates
Search tools and large language models help find candidate sources and organize the structure. Nothing they find is evidence until a person has checked it.
2. Checking the source
Every factual claim is traced to its source. What cannot be substantiated is cut, narrowed, or labeled as interpretation.
3. Automated checks
Routes, citation format, identifiers, links, contrast, and exported data are checked by machine. Whether a claim fairly represents its source is not.
4. Human review
An editor reads everything before it goes up. Sensitive pages also need review from the relevant expert or community, and the page says whether that has happened yet. Review is never implied before it occurs.
What a review means
An outside review covers one item and one question. It is not a seal on the whole site, and the review record says exactly what it covered.
Bound the scope
Record exactly what was reviewed: a claim set, source set, page, flow, domain, translation, or usability task. Review of one bounded artifact must never be represented as review of the whole product.
Match expertise to the question
Clinical accuracy, lived experience, disability access, cultural or worldview representation, decision science, privacy, and usability are different review questions. One reviewer is not presumed to validate domains outside their stated role.
Preserve disagreement
A reviewer may validate, correct, narrow, challenge, or leave a question unresolved. Material disagreement is documented rather than flattened into artificial consensus.
Separate review from endorsement
Participation, acknowledgement, or reviewer credit means only that the recorded material was reviewed within the stated scope. It does not imply endorsement of Values in Care, its other content, or any clinical use.
Credit only with permission
Reviewer names, organizations, affiliations, and public credit are opt-in. Anonymous review can still be recorded by reviewer role and scope without inventing identity or institutional backing.
A reviewer can mark an item reviewed, send it back, narrow it, or have it removed. When reviewers disagree, we record the disagreement rather than invent a consensus.
Review status
Values in Care is informed by peer-reviewed literature, established clinical frameworks, primary public sources, and tradition/community sources where appropriate, but the resource as a whole is not yet independently clinician-reviewed.
Sensitive modules may require review from relevant clinicians, ethicists, disability experts and community members, reproductive-health specialists, pediatric specialists, mental-health professionals, chaplains or spiritual-care professionals, tradition-specific scholars, and patients or caregivers before claims are treated as mature.
The review log must distinguish genuine completed review from local planning or browser-only sign-off tools. Source citation is not equivalent to external validation, and bounded review is not whole-product endorsement.
Citations you can download
The citation dataset is versioned and exported in machine-readable formats. Current dataset version: 1.22.2; last verified: 2026-09-01; 248 sources; license: CC BY-NC 4.0.
Automated checks confirm a link resolves. They cannot confirm a sentence represents its source fairly. That is a separate human job.
What we do not do
- We do not infer a person's preferences from diagnosis, religion, culture, disability, race, ethnicity, gender, family role, or another identity label.
- We do not label a generic values or conversation tool as a validated patient decision aid merely because it is interactive.
- We do not invent option probabilities, clinical outcomes, citations, reviewer names, affiliations, partnerships, or endorsements.
- We do not present a Decision Brief as consent, an advance directive, a clinical order, or a substitute for individualized professional judgment.
- We do not hide missing evidence by broadening language until a claim becomes impossible to verify.
Last updated: 2026-08-31. Read the limitations, integrity report, and evidence index for additional detail.
External frameworks remain the property of their respective organizations. Values in Care references them to explain its design basis; it does not claim certification or endorsement by AHRQ, IPDAS, NICE, OHRI, Cochrane, or any other cited organization.