If there's one thing people learned over the past two years, it's that clients often don't fully understand their financial lives. Cutting-edge advisors view this as a challenge: How does one educate clients and empower them to make the best possible choices?

The answer may come from a discipline we're all accustomed to thinking of as dysfunctional. Healthcare, more than any other field, has developed a formalized framework for imparting complex information and guiding well-thought-out decisions. Although it may seem far afield from finance, techniques developed for medical decision-making offer valuable lessons to planners seeking to improve their communication skills.

This movement is called "shared decision-making" or "decision aids." It aims to foster informed conversations about risk between patient and clinician, so they can jointly arrive at a decision that reflects the patient's true interests.

A MENU OF OPTIONS

In the past, doctors dictated, but this is no longer the case. Instead, today, there is frequently no single, clearly superior treatment option, and clinicians are obligated to turn over the choice to patients. Decision aids, whether they consist of information cards, videos or web pages, facilitate the conversation.

Say an individual is diagnosed with prostate cancer. The various treatment options-surgery, radiation and watchful waiting-often have comparable five-year survival rates. The side effects, though, are quite different. Patients choose which treatment they prefer, relying on their physician and a decision aid for input about risks and probabilities.

What exactly is a decision aid? Victor Montori, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic and one of the leaders in decision-aid research, describes them this way: "They are knowledge-transfer tools designed to enhance the natural conversation that should occur among patients and doctors about choices." Decision aids come in many formats- online, DVD, paper-and are typically reviewed in tandem with a physician. Aids are designed to depict risk very clearly and to avoid subtle biases. The goal is to ensure that patients are truly informed when making a decision.

Take diabetes care, Dr. Montori's specialty. In the traditional approach, a patient walks in, is told he or she has high sugars, and is handed a prescription and brochures about the medication. The doctor says: "See you in three months."

In the shared decision-making approach, a patient walks in with high sugars, but this is just the starting point for an informed conversation about how to proceed. In Montori's clinic at Mayo, doctor and patient sit together and review a decision aid he has developed (in this case, six small cards) for selecting diabetes medications. The cards are organized by the different concerns people have with various diabetes medications, including weight gain, side effects, the need for daily injections and cost. The cards show how the alternatives stack up and have been carefully tested for clarity and rigor. With a doctor's help, patients have the opportunity to choose their medication based on what is important to them, such as not gaining weight.

Patients who used the decision aids were compared to a control group. "Patients knew a lot more and were more interactive in our conversations when the aids were used," Montori says. Future studies will test if the aid improves compliance with the selected treatment; Montori believes it should. (See "The Diabetes Mellitus Medication Choice Decision Aid," in the Archives of Internal Medicine, for a full description of the Mayo intervention.)

APPLICATION TO PLANNING

A great deal of the research focus of the decision-aid movement studies how best to convey complex probabilities. This holds many insights for financial planning. Here, too, clients have to assess risks and probabilities. A planner can present possible scenarios, but the degree of risk to take with the portfolio is ultimately up to the client.

"Healthcare and financial decisions really have a lot in common," points out Annette O'Connor, senior decision scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute. "It used to be that the professional-the doctor or the planner-told people what to do. Today, there still is a professional judgment of what options are appropriate, but individuals now make choices within these options."

Finance has yet to develop a systematic approach to helping people with these dilemmas. Communications tools aren't typically scientifically tested through randomized trials. That's why planners looking for the most up-to-date methods in knowledge transfer, risk communications and structuring a conversation should familiarize themselves with the decision-aid movement.

PRESENTING DATA SIMPLY

Even if they don't deploy full-fledged decision aids, planners can implement discoveries from this field, particularly when it comes to presenting quantitative information. The bottom line is that presentation matters-a lot. Here are some tips for conveying quantitative information in an unbiased way: