PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

J Dowie

Publications and source records attributed to J Dowie.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2002

Development and preliminary evaluation of a clinical guidance programme for the decision about prophylactic oophorectomy in women undergoing a hysterectomy.

OBJECTIVES: To develop a decision analysis based and computerised clinical guidance programme (CGP) that provides patient specific guidance on the decision whether or not to undergo a prophylactic oophorectomy to reduce the risk of subsequent ovarian cancer and to undertake a preliminary pilot and evaluation. SUBJECTS: Women who had already agreed to have a hysterectomy who otherwise had no ovarian pathology. SETTING: Oophorectomy decision consultation at the outpatient or pre-admission clinic. METHODS: A CGP was developed with advice from gynaecologists and patient groups, incorporating a set of Markov models within a decision analytical framework to evaluate the benefits of undergoing a prophylactic oophorectomy or not on the basis of quality adjusted life expectancy, life expectancy, and for varying durations of hormone replacement therapy. Sensitivity analysis and preliminary testing of the CGP were undertaken to compare its overall performance with established guidelines and practice. A small convenience sample of women invited to use the CGP were interviewed, the interviews were taped and transcribed, and a thematic analysis was undertaken. RESULTS: The run time of the programme was 20 minutes, depending on the use of opt outs to default values. The CGP functioned well in preliminary testing. Women were able to use the programme and expressed overall satisfaction with it. Some had reservations about the computerised formal and some were surprised at the specificity of the guidance given. CONCLUSIONS: A CGP can be developed for a complex healthcare decision. It can give evidence-based health guidance which can be adjusted to account for individual risk factors and reflects a patient's own values and preferences concerning health outcomes. Future decision aids and support systems need to be developed and evaluated in a way which takes account of the variation in patients' preferences for inclusion in the decision making process.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Choosing the surgical mortality threshold for high risk patients with stage Ia non-small cell lung cancer: insights from decision analysis.

The recent British Thoracic Society guidelines recommend that surgical mortality should not be greater than 8% for pneumonectomy and 4% for lobectomy. These cut offs are advanced as guidelines to inform decision making as to whether or not patients with operable lung cancer should be offered surgery. They have been developed from a notion of what acceptable surgical mortality should be. The planning of care for patients with lung cancer involves making choices between different treatments with different outcomes. While it is accepted that the probability of these outcomes is likely to differ among patients, individual patient preferences for them are also likely to vary. Fixed cut offs for surgical mortality mean ignoring this variation. Decision analysis can be used to assist in the complex task of integrating clinical characteristics and varying patient preferences. By considering high risk patients with potentially curable stage Ia non-small cell lung cancer, it is shown that decision analysis has the potential to illuminate decision making and guideline development within the field of cancer care.

Carcinoma, Non-Small-Cell Lung↗
PubMed2001

Analysing health outcomes.

If we cross-classify the absolutist-consequentialist distinction with an intuitive-analytical one we can see that economists probably attract the hostility of those in the other three cells as a result of being analytical consequentialists, as much as because of their concern with "costs". Suggesting that some sources of utility (either "outcome" or "process" in origin) are to be regarded as rights cannot, says the analytical consequentialist, overcome the fact that fulfilling and respecting rights is a resource-consuming activity, one that will inevitably have consequences, in resource-constrained situations, for the fulfillment of the rights of others. Within the analytical consequentialist framework QALY-type measures of health outcome have the unique advantage of allowing technical and allocative efficiency to be addressed simultaneously, while differential weighting of QALYs accruing to different groups means that efficiency and equity can be merged into the necessary single maximand. But what if such key concepts of the analytical consequentialist are not part of the discursive equipment of others? Are they to be disqualified from using them on this ground? Is it ethical for intuition to be privileged in ethical discourse, or is the analyst entitled to "equal opportunities" in the face of "analysisism", the cognitive equivalent of "racism" and "sexism"?

Cost-Benefit Analysis↗
PubMed2001

Decision technologies and the independent professional: the future's challenge to learning and leadership.

Most references to "leadership" and "learning" as sources of quality improvement in medical care reflect an implicit commitment to the decision technology of "clinical judgement". All attempts to sustain this waning decision technology by clinical guidelines, care pathways, "evidence based practice", problem based curricula, and other stratagems only increase the gap between what is expected of doctors in today's clinical situation and what is humanly possible, hence the morale, stress, and health problems they are increasingly experiencing. Clinical guidance programmes based on decision analysis represent the coming decision technology, and proactive adaptation will produce independent doctors who can deliver excellent evidence based and preference driven care while concentrating on the human aspects of the therapeutic relation, having been relieved of the unbearable burdens of knowledge and information processing currently laid on them. History is full of examples of the incumbents of dominant technologies preferring to die than to adapt, and medicine needs both learning and leadership if it is to avoid repeating this mistake.

Decision Support Systems, Clinical↗
PubMed1999

What decision analysis can offer the clinical decision maker. Why outcome databases such as KIGS and KIMS are vital sources for decision analysis.

Cognitive Continuum Theory can be used to explain why the relationship between research and practice is more problematic than is customarily assumed. The various possible sources of evidence for clinical decision making and the alternative approaches to such decision making can be located within the main modes of this continuum, each of which embodies a different balance of intuition and analysis. Decision analysis is the only technique that provides the analytical depth necessary to arrive at a decision that systematically identifies, structures and integrates all the relevant evidence on clinical parameters and patient preferences, within whatever mode that evidence is generated. The inappropriateness of using research criteria in action evaluations is pointed out. In order to illustrate the application of the Cognitive Continuum Theory and decision analysis to growth hormone (GH) therapy, and to stimulate discussion of this area, a primitive clinical decision analysis and prototype 'clinical guidance tree' for GH is presented here.

Cognition↗
PubMed1998

Towards the equitably efficient and transparently decidable use of public funds in the deep blue millennium.

Health economists concerned about the efficiency and equity of health care provision have focused their attention and evaluations on programmes and interventions at a population or group level. Clinicians, including those seeking to improve the quality of care by making it more evidence-based, see their task as using their clinical judgment to make the best use of the resources available to them as a result of policy decisions The existence of significant incoherence between the two (or more) levels is increasingly recognized, but clinical guidelines, the only current response, are analytically inadequate to the task of reducing it. 'Clinical Guidance Trees', on the other hand, not only have the potential to bridge the policy-clinical gap but also provide the means by which public funds can be allocated to individual patients on the basis of a societally determined willingness to pay per incremental unit of benefit. This paper aims to stimulate debate about a system in which all public funds are allocated on the basis of patient specific cost-effectiveness analyses, conducted on the basis of sociopolitically determined parameters (including equity weightings), but individualized 'quality of life' measures. The system, seeking to maximize 'equificiency', would do away with the increasingly unsustainable division between public and private sector provision and remove many expensive layers of health care decision making. While it would have many problems (including strategic behaviour various by parties), these need to be considered in the light of the problems of all alternative systems, including those of the status quo.

Decision Trees↗
PubMed1998

The 'number needed to treat' and the 'adjusted NNT' in health care decision-making.

Within 'evidence-based medicine and health care' the 'number needed to treat' (NNT) has been promoted as the most clinically useful measure of the effectiveness of interventions as established by research. Is the NNT, in either its simple or adjusted form, 'easily understood', 'intuitively meaningful', 'clinically useful' and likely to bring about the substantial improvements in patient care and public health envisaged by those who recommend its use? The key evidence against the NNT is the consistent format effect revealed in studies that present respondents with mathematically-equivalent statements regarding trial results. Problems of understanding aside, trying to overcome the limitations of the simple (major adverse event) NNT by adding an equivalent measure for harm ('number needed to harm' NNH) means the NNT loses its key claim to be a single yardstick. Integration of the NNT and NNH, and attempts to take into account the wider consequences of treatment options, can be attempted by either a 'clinical judgement' or an analytical route. The former means abandoning the explicit and rigorous transparency urged in evidence-based medicine. The attempt to produce an 'adjusted' NNT by an analytical approach has succeeded, but the procedure involves carrying out a prior decision analysis. The calculation of an adjusted NNT from that analysis is a redundant extra step, the only action necessary being comparison of the results for each option and determination of the optimal one. The adjusted NNT has no role in clinical decision-making, defined as requiring patient utilities, because the latter are measurable only on an interval scale and cannot be transformed into a ratio measure (which the adjusted NNT is implied to be). In any case, the NNT always represents the intrusion of population-based reasoning into clinical decision-making.

Community Health Planning↗
PubMed1996

The research-practice gap and the role of decision analysis in closing it.

Current hypotheses for the existence of the 'research-practice gap' focus on weaknesses in research dissemination on the one hand and practitioner attitudes and motivations on the other. It is suggested that the gap has more fundamental origins in the cognitive and value mismatch between researchers and practitioners. To narrow the gap both cultures need to use a common framework (map and language) that is located at a level of analysis between their typical modes and makes explicit provision for the consideration of values. The decision analytic framework fulfills these requirements and it is therefore argued that all reports of research should include a decision analytic representations of the findings.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMed1996

'Evidence-based', 'cost-effective' and 'preference-driven' medicine: decision analysis based medical decision making is the pre-requisite.

Three broad movements are seeking to change the world of medicine. The proponents of 'evidence-based medicine' are mainly concerned with ensuring that strategies of proven clinical effectiveness are adopted. Health economists are mainly concerned to establish that 'cost-effectiveness' and not 'clinical effectiveness' is the criterion used in determining option selection. A variety of patient support and public interest groups, including many health economists, are mainly concerned with ensuring that patient and public preferences drive clinical and policy decisions. This paper argues that decision analysis based medical decision making (DABMDM) constitutes the pre-requisite for the widespread introduction of the main principles embodied in evidence-based medicine, cost-effective medicine and preference-driven medicine; that, in the light of current modes of practice, seeking to promote these principles without a prior or simultaneous move to DABMDM is equivalent to asking the cart to move without the horse; and that in fact DABMDM subsumes and enjoins the valuable aspects of all three. Particular attention is paid to differentiating between DABMDM and EBM, by way of analysis of various expositions of EBM and examination of two recent empirical studies. EBM, as so far expounded, reflects a problem-solving attitude that results in a heavy concentration on RCTs and meta-analyses, rather than a broad decision making focus that concentrates on meeting all the requirements of a good clinical decision. The latter include: ensuring that inferences from RCTs and meta-analyses to individual patients (or patient groups) are made explicitly; paying equally serious attention to evidence on values and costs as to clinical evidence; and accepting the inadequacy of 'taking into account and bearing in mind' as a way of integrating the multiple and distinct elements of a decision.

Cost-Benefit Analysis↗
PubMed1985

The political economy of the NHS: individualist justifications of collective action.

The paper outlines some of the main ways in which economists have argued a system of collective health care can be justified from a broadly individualistic position. It sets out the value judgments and technical conditions which generate the conclusion that competitive markets maximise welfare and then considers the reasons why these conditions may not apply in the health area (imperfections in supply, uncertainty, externalities). Particular attention is given to the arguments which rest on altruistic 'caring preferences'. Various sources of non-market (collective) failure are then identified, as countervailing argument.

Cost-Benefit Analysis↗