DECISION ANALYTIC MODELING IN HEALTH CARE DECISION MAKING

Abstract

The need to choose among alternatives instead of allowing the market to make choices has led health care professionals to rely on scientific information as an aid in decision making. Mathematical modeling is one of the increasingly common tools used over the past three decades to produce new information. But we have used almost exclusively noncomplex models to help analyze complex systems problems. The need to integrate the complexity of the interactions of clinical, quality of life, and economic attributes into such models can no longer be ignored. The opportunity is available to use existing complex systems modeling techniques for health care questions to improve the quality of study outputs, which can, in turn, help produce more rational decisions.