Synopses & Reviews
Decision making in health care means navigating through a complex and tangled web of diagnostic and therapeutic uncertainties, patient preferences and values, and costs. In addition, medical therapies may include 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 required resources. 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. An accompanying CD-ROM features solutions to the exercises, PowerPoint® presentations of the illustrations, and sample models and tables.
Review
"It is very readable, making a complex subject appear crystal clear and easy to understand. The exercises at the end of each chapter provide a useful check of understanding and examples of how to apply the skills...Overall, this book is a very useful addition to the literature on evidence-based health care, providing clear strategies for incorporating decision analysis into our daily decision making." Neuroradiology
Review
"This is an impressively comprehensive approach to clinical decision-making with every angle considered, advantages and disadvantages tabulated." Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine
Review
"Decision Making in Health and Medicine is an excellent resource dealing with the conduct of increasingly important and ubiquitous aids." ACP Journal Club
Review
"Very thought provoking." Doctors.net
Review
"The book is extremely well supported by exercises and the accompanying CD , and was well liked by our students...The book could also be a useful stepping stone to more advanced techniques in modeling or diagnostic test research but does not go into sufficient detail in the application of advanced tools such as Monte Carlo simulation to be used in isolation." - Brendan Delaney, University of Binghamton
Synopsis
Decision making in health care involves navigating through a complex and tangled web of diagnostic and therapeutic uncertainties, patient preferences and values, and costs. 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 and is designed for practitioners and trainees, and for students studying clinical decision analysis, EB-medicine, and clinical epidemiology.
Table of Contents
Preface; 1. Elements of decision making in health care; 2. Managing uncertainty; 3. Choosing the best treatment; 4. Valuing outcomes; 5. Interpreting diagnostic information; 6. Deciding when to test; 7. Multiple test results; 8. Finding and summarizing the evidence; 9. Constrained resources; 10. Recurring events; 11. Variability and uncertainty; 12. Proactive decision making: a way of life; Index.