Medical Decision-Making

Definition

Medical decision-making is the process by which a diagnosis or treatment plan is formulated from the available test information, often with incorporation of known patient preferences.

Description

Diagnoses and treatment choices by health-care providers and their patients are made under uncertainty. Medical decision-making can describe the process by which a diagnosis is derived from the retrieved facts at hand (Mark, 2008). It can also define the choices that are available for treatment or prevention of illness and attempt to maximize the expected health benefits given the probable outcomes of each choice.

Most clinicians use cognitive shortcuts, or heuristics, in order to guide them in their decision-making (Mark, 2008). For instance, the representativeness heuristic involves assessing whether a patient’s clinical features match the representative features of different diagnostic hypotheses. Medical decision-making often involves the generation of initial hypotheses and...