Medical Decision Making (MDM), a journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making, offers rigorous and systematic approaches to decision making that are designed to improve the health and clinical care of individuals and to assist with health policy development. The current Editor-in-Chief of MDM is Brian J. Zikmund-Fisher, PhD (University of Michigan), and the listing of current Associate Editors and Editorial Board members can be found here.
Published eight times a year, MDM presents theoretical, statistical, and modeling techniques and methods from a variety of disciplines including decision psychology, health economics, clinical epidemiology, and evidence synthesis. MDM promotes understanding of human decision-making processes so that individuals can make more informed and satisfying choices regarding their health. MDM’s audience includes researchers, clinicians, and policy-makers interested in methodologic contributions to, and applications of, medical decision making. A paper does not have to be “methodologic” to be considered for publication. For example, MDM is also particularly interested in exemplary applications of decision analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, risk prediction, Bayesian statistical analysis, and other modeling techniques to clinical, public health, and management problems. MDM also has an interest in well implemented systematic or narrative reviews of methodologic literature, decision tools, and economic analyses.
The editors of MDM are interested in articles that develop, advance, or evaluate methods or theory in clinical research, diagnosis, health economics, evidence synthesis, health policy, research on patient-centered outcomes (e.g., comparative effectiveness), informatics, health services research, judgment and decision psychology, mathematical models of diagnosis and treatment, assessment of preferences and quality of life, decision aids, risk communication, technology assessment, and statistical methods pertinent to any of these areas. Note, however, that in general MDM considers studies about diagnostic algorithm development and optimization that do not involve human decision making to be out of scope.
MDM focuses on important topics such as:
- Optimal strategies for patient care and policy decision making
- Understanding individual and group decision-making processes
- Outcomes of decisions, their measurement, and valuation
- Risk communication, risk attitudes, and judgment
- Methods to teach about and improve actual decisions (e.g., decision aids)
- Methods for technology assessment, literature synthesis, comparative effectiveness research, and evidence-based decision making
We are most interested in papers that involve innovative methods, though we also consider exemplary applications of standard methods, especially if they can serve as examples of best practices.
To submit a manuscript for consideration at MDM, please see Manuscript Requirements and Manuscript Submission. All manuscripts submitted to MDM are subject to a double-anonymized review process.