The Application of Decision Analysis to Clinical Medicine

Applying analysis to the clinical practice of medicine may result in better patient care. Although the decision trees are apparently simple, a model of the clinician's analysis requires consideration of the problem at three levels of sophistication. Experts in decision analysis can probably help health care providers and managers more accurately handle the uncertainty in patient care situations by developing good data bases, representing patients' utilities simply and accurately, and providing well-calibrated, data-driven estimates of probabilities. A common clinical problem, what to do for a patient who might have appendicitis, is analyzed in detail as an example.