Encyclopedia of Medical Decision Making

This encyclopedia addresses both prescriptive and descriptive decision making through a conceptual structure consisting of six components of classical decision analysis. It includes articles that have been prepared by more than 200 contributors from around the world. The alphabetical organization of the encyclopedia facilitates access to information.

A Reader’s Guide, organized by category of the decisionmaking process includes the following 7 components:

1. Identification of the decision maker - in other words, who must choose. In general, there are three levels of decision makers, each with a particular perspective: the individual patient or surrogate, the clinician, and society.
2. Identification of the decision to be made, for instance, the selection of the most likely diagnosis or the therapy with the best chance of cure. The essays pertaining to these first two components generally fall into the descriptive category: how decisions are influenced, finalized, and reviewed afterwards. These draw heavily from the field of cognitive psychology.
3. The consequences or outcomes of decisions and how these are defined and measured. The corresponding entries generally concern health econometrics and health-related quality-of-life measurement.
4. The value of the potential outcomes, often expressed as a monetary sum or a level of desirability termed utility.
5. The likelihood or probability of the possible consequences explored through essays on statistical concepts and clinical epidemiology.
6. The mechanism by which individuals, clinicians, and society determine the best decision. This involves ethics, cultural considerations informed by sociology and anthropology, and prescriptive approaches such as utility maximization as well as descriptive approaches related to cognitive psychology.
7. Methods and techniques used to predict outcomes and analyze decisions, whether at the individual patient, cohort, or societal level. The pertinent essays cover mathematical models of disease progression, diagnosis, and prognosis as well as economic evaluations.