Shared Decision Making in Health Care

Representing the first collection on the topic, this book builds from foundations to case studies, to future prospects, providing the reader with a rich and comprehensive understanding of the use of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) in healthcare. The first section of the collection presents the foundations of MCDA as it is applied to healthcare decisions, providing guidance on the ethical and theoretical underpinnings of MCDA and how to select MCDA methods appropriate to different decision settings. Section two comprises a collection of case studies spanning the decision continuum, including portfolio development, benefit–risk assessment, health technology assessment, priority setting, resource optimisation, clinical practice and shared decision making. Section three explores future directions in the application of MCDA to healthcare and identifies opportunities for further research to support these.

Consent and shared decision-making

This book comprehensively and critically discusses chronicity as a crucial challenge for the future of medicine in an era of aging populations and the steady growth of non-communicable comorbidities. It describes how health systems that are still designed and based on the treatment of acute diseases are suffering from crowded emergency rooms and growing conflicts between patients, while medical staff increasingly face frustration and the risk of burn-out.

Lung cancer is the second most diagnosed cancer and remains the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States. The high mortality is largely the consequence of late diagnosis; lung cancer is typically asymptomatic in early stages when a surgical cure is most likely. As a result, there has been great interest in and research on early detection of lung cancer through screening.

This volume brings together experiences and opinions from global leaders to develop affordable, sustainable, and uniformly available options to access healthcare services.