How often do you find yourself struggling with a decision, be it a medical decision, a policy decision, or a personal one? In clinical medicine and health-care policy, making decisions has become a very complicated process: we have to make trade-offs between risks, benefits, costs, and preferences. We have to take into account the rapidly increasing evidence – some good, some poor – presented in scientific publications, on the worldwide web, and by the media. We have to integrate the best available evidence with the values relevant to patient and society; and we have to reconcile our intuitive notions with rational analysis.

In this book we explain and illustrate tools for integrating quantitative evidence-based data and subjective outcome values in making clinical and health-policy decisions. The book is intended for all those involved in clinical medicine or health-care policy who would like to apply the concepts from decision analysis to improve their decision making process. The audience we have in mind includes (post-)graduate students and health-care professionals interested in medical decision making, clinical decision analysis, clinical epidemiology, evidence-based medicine, technology assessment in health care, and health-care policy. The main part of the book is written with graduate students as audience in mind. Some chapters cover advanced material and as such we would recommend reserving this material for advanced courses in decision modeling (the second half of Chapters 4 and 7, and the entire Chapters 10, 11, and 12).