M. G. Myriam Hunink Bücher

This updated edition serves as an essential resource for individuals engaged in medical decision-making, providing comprehensive insights and guidance. It addresses various aspects of the process, ensuring that readers are equipped with the latest knowledge and strategies to navigate complex healthcare choices effectively. The book emphasizes the importance of informed decisions and offers practical tools for both professionals and patients alike.

Decision making in health care means navigating through a complex and tangled web of diagnostic and therapeutic uncertainties, patient preferences and values, and costs. In addition, medical therapies may include side effects, surgery may lead to undesirable complications, and diagnostic technologies may produce inconclusive results. In many clinical and health policy decisions it is necessary to counterbalance benefits and risks, and to trade off competing objectives such as maximizing life expectancy vs optimizing quality of life vs minimizing the required resources. This textbook plots a clear course through these complex and conflicting variables. It clearly explains and illustrates tools for integrating quantitative evidence-based data and subjective outcome values in making clinical and health policy decisions. An accompanying CD-ROM features solutions to the exercises, PowerPoint® presentations of the illustrations, and sample models and tables.