What kind of issues does Decision Science address?
Decision analytic methods may be applied to a wide range of clinical, public health, and policy issues, including decisions facing individual patients and their providers, public health decisions that will affect a population, and environmental health decisions that will affect future generations. Inherent in a decision analytic approach is an explicit focus on identifying, measuring, and valuing the outcomes or consequences of decisions, as well as the uncertainty about these outcomes when decisions are made. Consequences are not limited to only clinical and public health outcomes, but also include economic consequences. When a decision analysis formally compares the relationship between the health economic consequences (i.e., costs) and the health consequences (i.e., population benefits) of alternative health care interventions, it is considered a cost-effectiveness analysis.