Decision making in health care involves consideration of a complex set of diagnostic, therapeutic and prognostic uncertainties. Medical therapies have side effects, surgical interventions may lead to complications, and diagnostic tests can produce misleading results. Furthermore, patient values and service costs must be considered. Decisions in clinical and health policy require careful weighing of risks and benefits and are commonly a trade-off of competing objectives: maximizing quality of life vs maximizing life expectancy vs minimizing the resources required. This text takes a proactive, systematic and rational approach to medical decision making. It covers decision trees, Bayesian revision, receiver operating characteristic curves, and cost-effectiveness analysis; as well as advanced topics such as Markov models, microsimulation, probabilistic sensitivity analysis and value of information analysis. It provides an essential resource for trainees and researchers involved in medical decision modelling, evidence-based medicine, clinical epidemiology, comparative effectiveness, public health, health economics, and health technology assessment.

The essential healthcare guide to doing more with existing resources The healthcare industry faces foundational challenges to how it sustains itself. As the gap between cost and revenue continues to widen, and as cost-effectiveness remains an elusive imperative, the question persists: how can healthcare organizations do more with the same resources? The Hospital and Clinic Improvement Handbook is a practical guide to how operations management - in particular Lean and the Theory of Constraints (TOC) - can rapidly advance value and performance in any healthcare organization. Utilizing a systems approach that will be relevant for healthcare managers and executives, it unpacks and demystifies concepts such as performance measures, operations, quality, cost accounting, pricing, and value enhancement, all as they relate to eliminating waste and non-value-adding activities. Enriched with dozens of examples and building on the authors' experience teaching and refining these concepts for healthcare, this text is an essential guide for executives and managers across the industry.