To discuss the design of a study on the degree of uncertainty, we will follow an order inspired from the Guidelines for Reporting Reliability and Agreement Studies (GRRAS) originally designed for diagnosis/score/measurements.[32] The method we here propose presupposes that a dilemma concerning the use of at least 2 different options in the management of some patients affected with a similar clinical problem has previously been identified and will be the object of a randomized trial. It also presupposes that investigators have previously reviewed the pertinent literature to identify the various management options that are clinically available, the evidence and more specifically the trials that have already been conducted to address the uncertainty, and the remaining concerns and controversies that persist regarding the management of these patients. This normally requires a systematic review.
Two preliminary remarks are in order: first, it is important to mark the difference with a survey of opinions of preferred treatments: More than surveying whether clinicians agree in principle or in theory, regarding certain types of cases in a generic sense, [18, 37] a reliability study is an empirical investigation that tests the reproducibility of judgments made in practice for a series of real particular cases.
Second, real clinical decisions are made once and then acted upon, while studies which assess reproducibility require the independent repetition of the same question concerning the same patient (or the same sort of patients) more than once. Although the study involves real clinicians and real patients, the context of the study is artificial, for decisions do not affect patient care. The experimental set up can be made to somewhat resemble clinical practice, however this may not always be possible, or even desirable (as we will see with the problem of prevalence below).
Investigators are interested in assessing the repeatability of clinical management decisions within and between clinicians on particular patients (Figure 1). Thus there are 3 components (3 dimensions) to each decision: Each decision D is one of Y choices which are made by one clinician X on one patient Z. Each component (Y, X, or Z) is determined by the experimental design (detailed in the methodology section of the report): 1) Decisions are one of a pre-specified number of categories (spectrum of ‘management choices’, which corresponds to the diagnostic categories of diagnostic studies); 2) Decisions concern an individual belonging to a heterogeneous collection of particular patients affected by the same problem or disease under investigation (spectrum of patients); and 3) Decisions are repeatedly made by a single (intra-rater) or multiple (inter-rater) clinicians of various backgrounds, practices and expertise (spectrum of raters or clinicians). The study team chooses the management categories (the subject of the clinical dilemma) that will be offered as choices and they assemble a collection of patients and of clinician responders. While each decision, clinician and patient are unique, the study must compare decisions to evaluate and summarize their repeatability when they concern the same individual. The agreement study involves preparing a portfolio of patients that is then independently submitted to several physicians. The severity of the reliability test, the subsequent interpretation and the future generalizability of the results all depend on the number and variety of individuals included in the experiment.
Spectrum of Patients
What kind of patients should be included in the study? The classic method to select patients that has the theoretical advantage of allowing statistical inference from the selected individuals to a population is to proceed with random sampling from that population. However, such populations are rarely available in reality. Furthermore, for pragmatic reasons, the number of patients to be studied must be limited, and a small ‘representative’ sample may not include the types and proportions of patients that are necessary to properly test reliability (of diagnoses or of management decisions). Attempts by the study team to duplicate the frequencies naturally found in medical practice in their constructed portfolio can create serious imbalance in the answers obtained. As with diagnostic tests, the statistical indices that will be used to summarize results are sensitive to prevalence (or frequency of decisions).[38, 39] If the object of the diagnostic reliability study is a rare disease, for example, the portfolio cannot include the proportion of patients naturally affected (say 1/1000); the same goes for management categories (such as invasive surgery). Finally, we must remember that here, we are not interested in capturing an index which estimates the distribution of a disease or characteristic in a population, nor in finding out which management option is most frequently used by a population of doctors, but the goal of the study is to rigorously test whether the clinical judgments that are made are repeatable, one patient at a time, no matter the circumstances, clinicians or patients. Thus, while the portfolio must include a diversity of patients, and it may be constructed to resemble a clinical series, it does not have to be ‘representative’ of a theoretical or specific population. The challenge is more akin to testing an experimental apparatus in a laboratory with specimens of a known composition (positive and negative controls), prior to using the apparatus to explore specimens of unknown composition. Just as the reliability of a balance is not rigorously tested by weighing the same object 10 times, or by weighing objects of very similar weights, but by testing it with a wide range of weights, the reliability of clinical judgments must be tested with a diversity of particular patients, ideally covering a wide range of possible clinical encounters, along various spectra (age, size, location, duration of symptoms etc..), whether they concern diagnostic verdicts or therapeutic decisions. In practice, the portfolio will typically be artificially constructed to include prototypical patients selected by members of the study team (who are familiar with the clinical dilemma) to be ‘positive’ and ‘negative controls’ for the various diagnostic or decision categories, to make sure they will be represented in the final decisions, as well as a substantial proportion of less typical or ‘grey zone’ cases.
The amount of information which should be provided for each patient included in the portfolio is a difficult question. To minimize the chance that clinicians might disagree based simply on different interpretation of the information provided, we believe it should be limited to the essential, for the purpose of the study is not to identify all potential reasons to disagree on a particular patient, but to measure the clinical uncertainty that remains even when extraneous reasons for potential disagreement are minimized.
While each patient included in the study is a concrete particular, sometimes uniquely identified by their radiograph or angiogram, for example, [22, 24, 25] the patient can always be grouped (at the time of clinical decisions or at the time of analyses) with other patients in a number of conceptual generalizations (or subgroups) that, according to some background knowledge pertinent to the clinical dilemma being studied, can influence clinical decisions. Investigators may be interested in exploring which patient or disease characteristic is associated with which decision. Patient or disease characteristics that will be included in each particular clinical vignette of the portfolio are generalizations (sometimes each with its own spectrum that may influence decisions. These may or may not be ‘reasons for decisions’ or ‘reasons for actions’, and they may be weighted differently by different clinicians. Investigators interested in exploring such details should ensure they include a sufficient number of particular patients with and without the characteristics of interest in the portfolio.
Like the baseline characteristics included in the registration form of a clinical trial, the information must be made available for each patient and expressed in a standardized fashion. These baseline characteristics are summarized in a descriptive Table of patients included in the study.
The source of patients included in the study should be mentioned in the study report. Patients may be selected from the data base of a registry or of a clinical trial. In such cases, the selection criteria of the trial should be mentioned. The exact selection of cases will of course impact results; the series of cases can be provided in extensio at the time of publication.
Spectrum of Clinicians
The study of the reliability of clinical decisions should include numerous clinicians of various backgrounds and experiences, from all specialties involved in the various management options pertinent to the dilemma under study, as each specialty shares a body of knowledge and beliefs (and frequently a preference for the treatment it usually performs). What renders a scale or a treatment recommendation reliable, is that judgments are repeatable even when made by clinicians of various backgrounds and experience in diverse patients. The questionnaire will collect some baseline information on participating clinicians, and the characteristics of the clinicians involved in the study can be detailed in a table. Results can also be analyzed separately for some subgroups of clinicians (for each specialty, or for experienced or ‘senior’ clinicians). Of course, clinicians from various specialties may have diverging opinions, but even colleagues with the same background working in the same center and exposed to similar experiences may not make the same treatment recommendation for the same patient.[25] [31] Again, this is no different from an evaluation of a diagnostic test. The goal of the study is not to find which treatment is most popular in some population of specialists, nor to try to identify ‘the right treatment’ by polling opinions. Thus it is not necessary for clinicians to be a representative sample of one specialty or another (although they may be). Participants responding to the survey are asked to seriously consider each case as if it were a momentous clinical decision, but respondents should be reassured they will not be judged; they should not be afraid of being “wrong”, because unlike an accuracy study, there is no gold standard with which to evaluate performance.
The problem is more delicate with intra-rater studies. These may be very informative, but they are rarely performed.[31, 40, 41] Better agreement can be expected when the same clinician responds twice to the same series of cases (typically weeks apart in patients presented in a different order to assure independence between judgments), but the risk here is that the clinician may reveal their own inconsistencies in decision-making. In the case of diagnostic tests, poor intra-rater agreement (across multiple raters) is evidence of the lack of reliability of the score/measurement/ diagnostic categories, and a strong indication that the scale or categories should be modified.[40] We see no reason to conclude differently with management decisions: when asked the same question twice, a clinician’s inconsistencies in recommending opposing options to the same patient only reasserts a high degree of uncertainty regarding the clinical dilemma being examined. Participating in such intra-rater studies can be a humbling experience, but one that can convince the participant that a clinical trial may be in order.
Management categories
For each case, clinicians are independently asked which predefined option they would recommend or carry out. Choices are readily made when the questionnaire is conceived at the time of the design of a randomized controlled trial (RCT): the options are the 2 treatments being compared. Particular attention should be paid to the wording of questions, as ambiguities can affect the reliability of responses. Of course, agreement will be less frequent when the number of possible options is increased: it is more difficult to agree on the use of various treatments (“would you use A, B, C, or conservative management?”), than agreeing on: “would you treat this patient with A? [Yes/No].” Categorical responses can sometimes be dichotomized at the time of analyses.[24, 25]
Results will of course depend on the way the questions are formulated, and the best way to conceive the questionnaire will depend on the particular object of the study.
The questionnaire may be given a test run with a few ‘test patients’ on a few ‘test clinicians’ before proceeding with the real study, as the wording of the questions included may need to be modified when problems with the first iterations are encountered.
Additional questions
The investigators may ask, for each decision, the level of confidence of participants.[22, 24, 25] If the questionnaire is prepared as a preliminary step in the design of a RCT, participants can also be asked the direct question: would you propose, to this patient, participation in a trial that randomly allocates treatments A and B.[23-25, 31]
Statistical power and analyses
The number of cases and clinicians necessary to judge reliability with sufficient rigor and power depends on several parameters.[42] They must be predefined and justified in the study protocol. The number of patients to be studied is typically limited for pragmatic reasons. The larger the number of cases to be studied, the smaller the number of clinicians will be willing to participate. We have found that for simple questions with a binary outcome, as a rule of thumb a minimal number of ten raters reviewing 30-50 patients is necessary for the study to be informative.[22-24, 40]
There are many statistical approaches to measure reliability and agreement, depending on the type of data (categorical, ordinal, continuous), the sampling method and on the treatment of errors.[32] Reliability in treatment recommendations (categories) is most frequently analyzed using kappa-like statistics. There are several types of kappa statistics, and a discussion of the appropriate use of one or the other is beyond the scope of this article. A statistician should be involved in the design of the study early on.
Analyses can be repeated for various subgroups of patients or clinicians. For example, in case of an agreement study involving physicians from various specialties, it can be useful to study the degree of agreement within each specialty, to show that disagreements are not explained by various training or backgrounds.[24, 31]
Similarly, if it is known that some patient characteristic is commonly used to select one option rather than the other, agreement for patients sharing that characteristic can be analyzed. It should be noted that subgroup analyses reduce the number of observations; there may not be a sufficient variety and number of cases to adequately assess the reliability of decisions regarding that particular characteristic; confidence intervals are irremediably wider and results should be interpreted with caution.