After this course the student is able to:
- Explain the aims and applications of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA)
- Catalogue MCDA methods and preferences elicitation methods according to their characteristics and their uses
- Perform a stakeholder preference study in the clinical, organizational or societal context
- Design, analyse and interpret the results of a preference study in a context of their own choosing within health care
- Contrast current decision making processes in health care to MCDA supported decision making
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Healthcare decisions are complex. Decision making in health care involves trade-offs between multiple objectives, for instance quality of life or survival. Often the perspectives of multiple stakeholders, such as patients, clinicians and the public have to be taken into account.
Decisions in health care have to be made at many levels:
• In his or her office, the doctor aims to make decisions in the best interest of the patient, in cooperation with the patient
• Hospitals, or other health care organisations have to make decisions to ensure high quality and efficient, but also financially viable health care
• On the societal level, new medical devices and pharmaceuticals that are introduced to the market have to be assessed with regard to their benefits and risks, and their need to be reimbursed, while the health care budget is limited.
Using structured, explicit approaches to analyse these kind of decisions can improve the quality of decision making. A set of techniques, known as multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA), can offer structure, transparency and validity to decision processes. MCDA methods are increasingly used to support decisions in health care on the patient, organizational and societal level, and offers a way to incorporate information from health technology assessment with other sources of evidence or knowledge.
In the course “stakeholder preference elicitation and decision support”, the student will be introduced to a range of techniques to elicit stakeholder preferences and to incorporate these in decision processes. They will acquire the skills required to use these techniques to elicit preferences from actual stakeholders, to analyse and visualize the data, and to interpret and report the results while taking into account the characteristics of the context.
Students will be familiarized with (the use of MCDA in) portfolio management, benefit-risk assessment (BRA), health technology assessment (HTA), and shared decision making (SDM). Moreover, they will learn about the potential of MCDA techniques both for individual preference elicitation and group decision support. Finally they will use MCDA to design an study and analyse the results of a MCDA of a health care problem of their own choosing.
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1 groepsopdracht en
1 individueel schriftelijk tentamen
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