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P8765  Decision Analysis: Making Decisions in Public Health and Medicine

Prerequisite: an introductory course in probability and statistics; introductory economics is recommended but not required. The rapid accumulation of public health and clinical information makes decisions in public health and medicine increasingly difficult. Decision science provides rigorous methods for organizing complex problems into an analyzable framework as a basis for decision making. In the public health arena, decision analysis is now applied to everything from clinical decisions facing individuals and their doctors, to public health decisions affecting populations, to environmental health decisions impacting current and future generations. Decision sciences have sought to bring together all the relevant facts, the best available evidence — and even our values and feelings — to evaluate the probabilities of risks and the consequences of those risks. This course is designed to introduce the student to the methods and range of applications of decision analysis in health care technology assessment, medical decision making, and health resource allocation.

3 points