Decision Making In Health Care

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.

This analysis of the law's approach to healthcare decision-making critiques its liberal foundations in respect of three categories of people: adults with capacity, adults without capacity and adults who are subject to mental health legislation. Focusing primarily on the law in England and Wales, the analysis also draws on the law in the United States, legal positions in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and Scotland and on the human rights protections provided by the ECHR and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Having identified the limitations of a legal view of autonomy as primarily a principle of non-interference, Mary Donnelly questions the effectiveness of capacity as a gatekeeper for the right of autonomy and advocates both an increased role for human rights in developing the conceptual basis for the law and the grounding of future legal developments in a close empirical interrogation of the law in practice.

First edition published as: Evidence-based patient choice.. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

An evidence-based analysis of the opportunities and challenges of moving towards more person-centred health systems.

This comprehensive reference delves into the complex process of medical decision making—both the nuts-and-bolts access and insurance issues that guide choices and the cognitive and affective factors that can make patients decide against their best interests. Wide-ranging coverage offers a robust evidence base for understanding decision making across the lifespan, among family members, in the context of evolving healthcare systems, and in the face of life-changing diagnosis. The section on applied decision making reviews the effectiveness of decision-making tools in healthcare, featuring real-world examples and guidelines for tailored communications with patients. Throughout, contributors spotlight the practical importance of the field and the pressing need to strengthen health decision-making skills on both sides of the clinician/client dyad. Among the Handbook’s topics: From laboratory to clinic and back: connecting neuroeconomic and clinical mea sures of decision-making dysfunctions. Strategies to promote the maintenance of behavior change: moving from theoretical principles to practices. Shared decision making and the patient-provider relationship. Overcoming the many pitfalls of communicating risk. Evidence-based medicine and decision-making policy. The internet, social media, and health decision making. The Handbook of Health Decision Science will interest a wide span of professionals, among them health and clinical psychologists, behavioral researchers, health policymakers, and sociologists.

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

Decision making is a critical element in the field of medicine that can lead to life-or-death outcomes, yet it is an element fraught with complex and conflicting variables, diagnostic and therapeutic uncertainties, patient preferences and values, and costs. Together, decisions made by physicians, patients, insurers, and policymakers determine the quality of health care, quality that depends inherently on counterbalancing risks and benefits and competing objectives such as maximizing life expectancy versus optimizing quality of life or quality of care versus economic realities. Broadly speaking, concepts in medical decision making (MDM) may be divided into two major categories: prescriptive and descriptive. Work in the area of prescriptive MDM investigates how medical decisions should be done using complicated analyses and algorithms to determine cost-effectiveness measures, prediction methods, and so on. In contrast, descriptive MDM studies how decisions actually are made involving human judgment, biases, social influences, patient factors, and so on. The Encyclopedia of Medical Decision Making gives a gentle introduction to both categories, revealing how medical and healthcare decisions are actually 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 With comprehensive and authoritative coverage by experts in the fields of medicine, decision science and cognitive psychology, and healthcare management, this two-volume Encyclopedia is a must-have resource for any academic library.