Resource Pack: Decision Science Textbooks
2023
This resource pack, curated by the Center for Health Decision Science, features introductory textbooks in decision analysis. These textbooks are mainly aimed at health professional schools but also public policy, law, business and engineering. Each textbook is accompanied by a downloadable PDF document with information on each chapter.
The textbooks are broadly organized into three groups. The first group contains books on general decision analysis. They inform the reader on overarching decision analytic topics, such as framing a decision, determining the perspective and values of the decision maker, incorporating complexity, and analyzing uncertainty with sensitivity analysis and other methods. These resources include:
- Problem Solving, Decision Making, and Professional Judgment
- Making Hard Decisions with Decision Tools, 3rd Edition
- Advances in Decision Analysis: From Foundations to Applications
- Handbook of Decision Analysis
- Foundations of Decision Analysis
The second group are a subset of the first, but are in the realm of clinical medicine and public health. Many concepts are similar to the first, but more weight is given to the interpretation of medical tests, and attributing values to being in particular "health states" to inform decisions. These resources include:
- Decision Making in Health and Medicine: Integrating Evidence and Values
- Prevention Effectiveness: Guide to Decision Analysis and Economic Evaluation, 2nd Edition
- Medical Decision Making
- Clinical Decision Analysis
- Encyclopedia of Medical Decision Making
The third group is a collection of textbooks with an economic approach to decision problems in health and healthcare. This group includes economic evaluation - that is, how to weigh up the relative merits and drawbacks of health interventions with limited resources. Two resources zoom in further to cost-effectiveness analysis, the method of analyzing and trading off a monetary cost against the health effects of a particular intervention. This technique is used widely to inform resource allocation for health interventions. The resources in this category include:
- Methods for the Economic Evaluation of Health Care Programmes, 4th Edition
- Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine, 1st Edition
- Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine, 2nd Edition
- Cost-Effectiveness Analysis in Health: a Practical Approach, 3rd Edition
Click here to download a PDF document of this complete pack
Source:
Resource Pack: Decision Science Textbooks. Center for Health Decision Science, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health 2023. http://repository.chds.hsph.harvard.edu/repository/collection/resource-pack-decision-science-textbooks