Detailed resource showing how to best make medical decisions while incorporating clinical practice guidelines and decision support systems

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. The text provides a thorough understanding of the key decision-making infrastructure of clinical practice and explains the principles of medical decision making for both individual patients and the wider healthcare 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.

This newly revised and updated Third Edition includes updates throughout the text, especially concerning new developments in big data. Theory on writing guidelines is included as a practical tool for practitioners in the field.

Written by three distinguished and highly qualified authors, Medical Decision Making includes information on:

• How to be consider possible causes of a patient's problems, and how to characterize information gathered during medical interviews and physical examinations
• Bayes' theorem, covering its assumption, using it to interpret a sequence of tests, and using it when many diseases are under consideration
• How to describe test results (abnormal and normal, positive and negative), and measuring a test's capability to reveal the patient's true state
• Decisions trees, selecting a decision maker, quantifying uncertainty, expected value calculations, and sensitivity analysis

Medical Decision Making is a valuable resource for a wide range of general practitioners and clinicians, as well as medical trainees at intermediate and advanced levels, who wish to fully understand and apply decision modeling, enhance their practice, and improve patient outcomes.
About the Author:

Harold C. Sox is Emeritus Professor of Medicine and of The Dartmouth Institute at Dartmouth Medical School, USA. Douglas K. Owens is general internist and a Senior Investigator at the Center for Health Care Evaluation at the VA Health Care System, Palo Alto, USA and a Professor of Medicine and of Health Research and Policy at Stanford University, USA. Michael Higgins is Consulting Associate Professor at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, Palo Alto, USA.