WW9: THE USE OF MULTI-ATTRIBUTE ANALYSIS AND PAIR-WISE COMPARISONS FOR GROUP DECISION-MAKING

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: Decision-making is a process of assessing alternatives and their attributes versus an objective(s), trading-off various advantages and disadvantages, and ultimately synthesizing the information to culminate at a central point: a decision. The aim of the workshop is to outline a systematic process for group decision-making. A formulary decision incorporating clinical, economic and humanistic data from the perspective of a hospital committee will be used as an illustration. PARTICIPANTS WHO WOULD BENEFIT: Researchers who are involved in creating group decision-analytic models and systems, and stakeholders involved in formulary selection. A key issue in pharmaceutical research is the development and use of applied approaches to help decision-makers synthesize various pieces of information and arrive at a decision. Decision-making is often difficult because trade-offs must be made among competing objectives and priorities. In order to make tradeoffs, we must be able to evaluate and measure each aspect of the decision—some quantitative, some qualitative, some very important, and some not so important. Uncertainties and competing interest groups also add to the complexity of decision-making. The ability to make effective decisions in the face of complexity can be significantly increased by a systematic process incorporating multiple attributes (economics, clinical outcomes, etc.) and pairwise comparisons (A vs. B, B vs. C, A vs. C). The session will describe a systematic approach and provide an interactive illustration for construction of a decision-model based on a process developed by mathematicians at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. A model will be developed for the formulary selection of cholesterol lowering statins from a hospital P&T perspective, considering economic, clinical and humanistic outcomes, with participation from the audience including handheld key pads for input.