Abt Associates, in collaboration with the Joint Commission, is developing a set of training modules for the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality to be used by hospital leaders and health care professionals to improve informed consent practices. The team also is pilot testing the modules and strategies to improve informed consent in four hospitals and revising the modules based on the findings to ultimately provide hospitals an actionable resource with guidance on how to improve their informed consent processes for treatment and procedures.
  
The project entails:

• Reviewing the peer-reviewed and grey literature, de-identified accreditation data, and questions related to informed consent;
• Conducting a gaps analysis to identify opportunities to improve informed consent;
• Developing two training modules – one for hospital leaders and one for health care professionals;
• Offering the training modules via a learning management system;
• Designing and executing a pilot test of the training modules and strategies to improve informed consent in four hospitals across four units;
• Revising the training modules and strategies based on the pilot test findings;
• Engaging an Expert and Stakeholder Panel (ESP) for input; and
• Publishing a peer-reviewed manuscript.

The Abt team has engaged the ESP, completed the review of literature and accreditation data to understand opportunities for improvement, developed two Informed Consent Training Modules with key strategies and techniques to improve informed consent, trained staff in each of the four pilot hospitals via a learning management system, and begun following hospitals’ implementation of strategies and collecting data for the pilot test.
 
The Abt team also has presented findings on the opportunities for improvements in informed consent and preliminary baseline findings at the Health Literacy Research Conference (2014 & 2015) and the Dartmouth Summer Institute for Informed Patient Choice (2014).