Course Level: Beginner
Course Limit: 30
Format Requirements: This course will be an interactive workshop. There are no prerequisites, though some familiarity with basic concepts of decision analysis is recommended.
Background: The quality, efficiency, and costs of health care are ultimately determined by decisions made by patients, providers, payers, and policy makers. Many medical decisions involve a complex interplay between multiple considerations and options that offer different combinations of advantages and disadvantages. These decisions are further complicated by the ever-present uncertainty about future outcomes, insufficient data, practical constraints, and the involvement of multiple stakeholders. Multi-criteria decision making methods are designed to help people make better decisions in complex circumstances such as these. In many practical applications, they have successfully fostered high quality decision making processes and enhanced communication among involved stakeholders. Despite the close correspondence between the needs of medical decision makers and multi-criteria methods, they are infrequently used to support medical decision making and many medical decision makers are unaware of their capabilities.
Description and Objectives: The course goal is to provide participants with a practical introduction to the use of multi-criteria methods in medical decision making. The course objectives are:
- To review the philosophy and theory of multi-criteria decision making methods.
- To teach participants how to analyze a medical problem using a multi-criteria approach.
- To discuss current issues regarding the use of multi-criteria methods in medical decision making and collaborative approaches to addressing them.
We will meet the study objectives by interactively analyzing a medical decision using a multi-criteria approach. We will examine the decision from both the policy and clinical perspectives.Topics covered will include creating the decision model, determining decision priorities, evaluating decision options, generating results, and sensitivity analysis.
We will use the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a widely used multi-criteria method, as our primary method of analysis. Differences and similarities among different multi-criteria methods will be discussed at each stage of the analysis. Participants will be encouraged to take an active role in every step of the analysis.
Course materials will include pertinent references, sources of ongoing information about multi-criteria methods, and information about available software tools.