Decision Making in Health and Medicine

Decision making in health care involves navigating through a complex and tangled web of diagnostic and therapeutic uncertainties, patient preferences and values, and costs. Medical therapies have side effects, surgery may lead to undesirable complications, and diagnostic technologies may produce inconclusive results. In many clinical and health policy decisions it is necessary to counterbalance benefits and risks, and to trade off competing objectives such as maximizing life expectancy vs optimizing quality of life vs minimizing the resources required. This textbook plots a clear course through these complex and conflicting variables. It clearly explains and illustrates tools for integrating quantitative evidence-based data and subjective outcome values in making clinical and health policy decisions. The book will be of immense practical value for all those charged with the responsibility of decision making in medicine, including practitioners and trainees, and for students studying clinical decision analysis, EB-medicine, and clinical epidemiology.