This volume presents novel concepts to help physicians and health care providers better understand the thought processes and approaches used in clinical decision-making and how we develop those skills as we transition from being a medical student to post-graduate trainee to independent practitioner. Approaches presented range from simple rules of thumb, pattern recognition, and heuristics, to more formulaic methods such as standard operating procedures, checklists, evidence-based medicine, mathematical modeling, and statistics. Ways to recognize and manage errors and how our decision-making can be improved, are also discussed. An Introduction to Medical Decision-Making presents several innovative techniques to allow the reader to use the principles presented and integrate the ethical, humanistic and social aspects of decision-making with the pragmatic and knowledge-based aspects of clinical medicine. It also highlights how our thinking processes, emotions, and biases affect decision-making. This invaluable resource will allow students and physicians to evaluate and critically discuss their decisions objectively to become more efficient and effective, and maximize the quality of care they provide.

Medical Decision Making provides clinicians with a powerful framework for helping patients make decisions that increase the likelihood that they will have the outcomes that are most consistent with their preferences. This new edition provides a thorough understanding of the key decision making infrastructure of clinical practice and explains the principles of medical decision making both for individual patients and the wider health care arena. It shows how to make the best clinical decisions based on the available evidence and how to use clinical guidelines and decision support systems in electronic medical records to shape practice guidelines and policies. Medical Decision Making is a valuable resource for all experienced and learning clinicians who wish to fully understand and apply decision modelling, enhance their practice and improve patient outcomes. “There is little doubt that in the future many clinical analyses will be based on the methods described in Medical Decision Making, and the book provides a basis for a critical appraisal of such policies.” - Jerome P. Kassirer M.D., Distinguished Professor, Tufts University School of Medicine, US and Visiting Professor, Stanford Medical School, US

The Encyclopedia of Medical Decision Making presents state-of-the-art research and ready-to-use facts sorting out findings on medical decision making and their applications.

Decision making is a key activity, perhaps the most important activity, in the practice of healthcare. Although physicians acquire a great deal of knowledge and specialised skills during their training and through their practice, it is in the exercise of clinical judgement and its application to individual patients that the outstanding physician is distinguished. This has become even more relevant as patients become increasingly welcomed as partners in a shared decision making process. This book translates the research and theory from the science of decision making into clinically useful tools and principles that can be applied by clinicians in the field. It considers issues of patient goals, uncertainty, judgement, choice, development of new information, and family and social concerns in healthcare. It helps to demystify decision theory by emphasizing concepts and clinical cases over mathematics and computation.

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

Decision Making in Health Care, first published in 2000, is a comprehensive overview of the field of medical decision making.

For people interested in risk management, medical activity represents a stimulating field of study and thought. On the one hand, progress in medical knowledge and technology tends to reduce the risks to survival that individuals would face in the absence of appropriate diagnostic or therapeutic instruments. On the other hand, new medical technologies simultaneously create their own specific risks, sometimes simply because their effects are less well-known than those of established ones. In a sense any medical progress simultaneously generates new risks while destroying old ones. Moreover, unlike many financial risks that can be either divided or transferred to others (e.g. through diversification, insurance or social security) the personal aspects of medical risks are by essence indivisible and non-transferable. As a result, they are in a sense more threatening than financial risks for risk averse patients. These two facts explain and justify the growing interest in risk economics for the fields of medical decision making and health economics. In Risk and Medical Decision Making, part 1 is developed inside the expected utility (E-U) model and analyses how comorbidity risks affect the well-known "test-treatment" thresholds. Part 2 is devoted to a specific non E-U model with the same purpose: how would one define a threshold in this context and how would one value a diagnostic test? In each of these two parts both diagnostic and therapeutic risks are considered.

For the past few years, the author, a renowned economist, has been applying the statistical tools of economics to decision making under uncertainty in the context of patient health status and response to treatment. He shows how statistical imprecision and identification problems affect empirical research in the patient-care sphere.

"Jewish medical ethics presented in light of the most contemporary medical information and rabbinic rulings. The author provides guidance to facilitate complex decision-making for the most common medical dilemmas today, such as surrogacy, assisted suicide, and end-of-life issues"--

David Rothman gives us a brilliant, finely etched study of medical practice today. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the practice of medicine in the United States underwent a most remarkable--and thoroughly controversial--transformation. The discretion that the profession once enjoyed has been increasingly circumscribed, and now an almost bewildering number of parties and procedures participate in medical decision making. Well into the post-World War II period, decisions at the bedside were the almost exclusive concern of the individual physician, even when they raised fundamental ethical and social issues. It was mainly doctors who wrote and read about the morality of withholding a course of antibiotics and letting pneumonia serve as the old man's best friend, of considering a newborn with grave birth defects a "stillbirth" thus sparing the parents the agony of choice and the burden of care, of experimenting on the institutionalized the retarded to learn more about hepatitis, or of giving one patient and not another access to the iron lung when the machine was in short supply. Moreover, it was usually the individual physician who decided these matters without formal discussions with patients, their families, or even with colleagues, and certainly without drawing the attention of journalists, judges, or professional philosophers. The impact of the invasion of outsiders into medical decision-making, most generally framed, was to make the invisible visible. Outsiders to medicine--that is, lawyers, judges, legislators, and academics--have penetrated its every nook and cranny, in the process giving medicine exceptional prominence on the public agenda and making it the subject of popular discourse. The glare of the spotlight transformed medical decision making, shaping not merely the external conditions under which medicine would be practiced (something that the state, through the regulation of licensure, had always done), but the very substance of medical pract