title: Decision support systems in health economics.
abstract: This article describes a system addressed to different health care professionals for building, using, and sharing decision support systems for resource allocation. The system deals with selected areas, namely the choice of diagnostic tests, the therapy planning, and the instrumentation purchase. Decision support is based on decision-analytic models, incorporating an explicit knowledge representation of both the medical domain knowledge and the economic evaluation theory. Application models are built on top of meta-models, that are used as guidelines for making explicit both the cost and effectiveness components. This approach improves the transparency and soundness of the collaborative decision-making process and facilitates the result interpretation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Systems, University of Pavia, Italy.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Quaglini
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Dazzi
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Stefanelli
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Barosi
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Marchetti
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D003660:Decision Support Systems, Management; D003663:Decision Trees; D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000191:economics*; D015276:Health Care Rationing / Q000191:economics / Q000379:methods*; D020407:Internet; D007558:Italy