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Medical Decision-Making

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine

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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...

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References and Further Reading

  • Mark, D. B. (2008). Chapter 3: Decision-making in clinical medicine. In A. S. Fauci, E. Braunwald, D. L. Kasper, S. L. Hauser, D. L. Longo, J. L. Jameson, & J. Loscalzo (Eds.), Harrison’s principles of internal medicine (17th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

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  • Weinstein, M. C., & Fineberg, H. V. (1980). Clinical decision analysis. Philadelphia: Saunders.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Cardiology, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY, USA

    William Whang

Authors
  1. William Whang
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Correspondence to William Whang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Miami School of Medicine, Miami, FL, USA

    Marc Gellman

Section Editor information

  1. School of Nursing, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Linda C. Baumann

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Whang, W. (2019). Medical Decision-Making. In: Gellman, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6439-6_1295-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6439-6_1295-2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-6439-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-6439-6

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