Decision Making in Health and Medicine
Integrating Evidence and Values

A guide for everyone involved in medical decision making to plot a clear course through complex and conflicting benefits and risks.

M. G. Myriam Hunink (Author), Milton C. Weinstein (Author), Eve Wittenberg (Author), Michael F. Drummond (Author), Joseph S. Pliskin (Author), John B. Wong (Author), Paul P. Glasziou (Author)

9781107690479, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 16 October 2014

446 pages, 2 b/w illus. 107 colour illus. 44 tables
24.7 x 17.5 x 2 cm, 0.89 kg

Review of previous edition: 'This book would be a useful acquisition for a statistician who needs the basics of decision-making, and it would certainly be a good book for a non-statistician.' Pharmaceutical Statistics

Decision making in health care involves consideration of a complex set of diagnostic, therapeutic and prognostic uncertainties. Medical therapies have side effects, surgical interventions may lead to complications, and diagnostic tests can produce misleading results. Furthermore, patient values and service costs must be considered. Decisions in clinical and health policy require careful weighing of risks and benefits and are commonly a trade-off of competing objectives: maximizing quality of life vs maximizing life expectancy vs minimizing the resources required. This text takes a proactive, systematic and rational approach to medical decision making. It covers decision trees, Bayesian revision, receiver operating characteristic curves, and cost-effectiveness analysis, as well as advanced topics such as Markov models, microsimulation, probabilistic sensitivity analysis and value of information analysis. It provides an essential resource for trainees and researchers involved in medical decision modelling, evidence-based medicine, clinical epidemiology, comparative effectiveness, public health, health economics, and health technology assessment.

About the authors
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
List of abbreviations
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. Estimation, calibration and validation
12. Heterogeneity and uncertainty
13. Psychology of judgment and choice
Index.

Subject Areas: Public health & preventive medicine [MBN], Medical profession [MBD]