ABSTRACT
Evidence-based clinical decision-making focuses on generally available evidence for care, its importance, and its applicability to individual patients and their groups of special interest. Since the seventeenth century, social sciences, political and business sciences have developed decision theory as a set of quantitative methods for reaching optimal decisions. Clinical decision analysis method is used in finance, business, military affairs, industry, and economics. In community medicine, a new vaccine against a viral infection is available for a community with low herd immunity against it. Economic assessment of medical malpractice also includes decision analyzes using decision trees, Markov models from the prognosis domain, and receiver operating characteristic curves analysis from the diagnosis domain. Tools which provide directions include both tactical tools such as clinical algorithm development, uses, and evaluation, and strategic tools such as clinical practice guidelines. Individual-related fallacies may be reasoning-based, from the motivation to decide domain, or related to decisions themselves.
