Medical decision making is an essential part of health care. It involves choosing an action after weighing the risks and benefits of the options available to the individual patient or the patient population. While all decisions in health care are made under conditions of uncertainty, the degree of uncertainty depends on the availability, validity, and generalizability of clinical data. Medical decision analysis (or decision-analytic modeling) is a systematic approach to decision making under uncertainty that is used widely in medical decision making, clinical guideline development, and health technology assessment of preventive, diagnostic or therapeutic procedures. It involves combining evidence for different outcomes and from different sources. Outcome parameters may include disease progression, treatment efficacy/effectiveness, safety, quality of life, and individual patient preferences. Sources may include epidemiological studies on the natural history of the disease, randomized clinical trials, observational studies, pharmacoepidemiologic studies, quality of life surveys, risk attitude studies, and others.
This is one of the core short courses of the permanent SMDM curriculum. The SMDM curriculum serves the core mission of the Society to educate its members in key content areas, including decision modeling, cost-effectiveness analysis, the psychology of medical decision making, and shared decision making. This newly designed online core course, consists of lectures and will facilitate live interaction and foster discussion using polling tools, a break-out sessions to connect participants and chat functions for fast response to questions along the course. Examples of published medical decision analyses will be used to illustrate the fields of application, methodological approaches, results and implications of medical decision analysis. Participants will receive material that goes beyond the course for further self-learning. The intended audience includes researchers from all substance matter fields. This is an introductory course; there are no prerequisites. Please have a simple pocket calculator with you!
This half day course provides an introduction into medical decision analysis a tool for clinical evaluation, benefit-harm analysis and medical decision making. During the course, participants will develop a basic understanding of:
Using practical examples, participants will be guided through the main modeling steps. Examples from the published literature including COVID-19 examples will be discussed to understand the application of modeling techniques to specific decision problems and research questions. Modeling recommendations of the ISPOR-SMDM Joint Modeling Good Research Practices Task Force will be presented to allow participants assessing and judging the quality and validity of decision models. Strengths and limitations of medical decision analysis will be discussed with specific aspects related to the COVID-19 pandemic.