Decision analytic modeling in health care decision making - Oversimplifying a complex world?

The need to choose among alternatives instead of allowing the market to mak e choices has led health care professionals to rely on scientific informati on as an aid in decision making. Mathematical modeling is one of the increa singly common tools used over the past three decades to produce new informa tion. But we have used almost exclusively noncomplex models to help analyze complex systems problems. The need to integrate the complexity of the inte ractions of clinical, quality of life, and economic attributes into such mo dels can no longer be ignored. The opportunity is available to use existing complex systems modeling techniques for health care questions to improve t he quality of study outputs, which can, in turn, help produce more rational decisions.