Decision-making is a critical element in medicine that can lead to life-or-death outcomes. Yet, it is fraught with complex and conflicting variables, diagnostic and therapeutic uncertainties, patient preferences and values, and costs. Decisions made by physicians, patients, insurers, and policymakers determine the quality of health care, which depends inherently on counterbalancing risks and benefits and competing objectives such as maximizing life expectancy versus optimizing the quality of life or quality of care versus economic realities.
Medical decision-making (MDM) concepts may be divided into two major categories: prescriptive and descriptive. Work in prescriptive MDM investigates how medical decisions should be made using complicated analyses and algorithms to determine cost-effectiveness measures, prediction methods, etc. In contrast, descriptive MDM studies decisions involving human judgment, biases, social influences, patient factors, etc. The Encyclopedia of Medical Decision Making gives a gentle introduction to both categories, revealing how medical and healthcare decisions are made―and constrained―and how physician, healthcare management, and patient decision-making can be improved to optimize health outcomes.
Key Features
- Discusses very general issues that span many aspects of MDM, including bioethics; health policy and economics; disaster simulation modeling; medical informatics; the psychology of decision-making; shared and team medical decision-making; social, moral, and religious factors; end-of-life decision-making; assessing patient preference and patient adherence; and more
- Incorporates both quantity and quality of life in optimizing a medical decision
- Considers characteristics of the decisionmaker and how those characteristics influence their decisions
- Presents outcome measures to judge the quality or impact of a medical decision
- Examines some of the more commonly encountered biostatistical methods used in prescriptive decision-making
- Provides utility assessment techniques that facilitate quantitative medical decision-making
- Addresses the many different assumption perspectives the decision maker might choose from when trying to optimize a decision
- Offers mechanisms for defining MDM algorithms
This two-volume encyclopedia, with comprehensive and authoritative coverage by experts in medicine, decision science, cognitive psychology, and healthcare management, is a must-have resource for any academic library.
