CBDSM researchers are interested in applying decision research across a variety of clinical areas, including cancer, organ transplantation, chronic illnesses, and the effect of medical disabilities.
Many cognitive issues affect health communication and the provision of medical care. We seek to further the basic science of cognition research while identifying how these factors influence medical decision making.
Our research has a broad focus on health communication and education. We develop and evaluate decision aids, identify new methods of communicating risk, and study ways to improve doctor-patient communication.
Ethics and decision making are obviously interrelated. CBDSM studies have considered topics ranging from the privacy of health information to physician deception.
Because the outcomes of decision research can depend on the methods used, CBDSM researchers devote considerable attention to methods research. Our work ranges from comparing utility elicitation methods and different types of decision aids to developing new measures for survey research.
More and more, patients are seeking greater involvement in their medical decisions and more detailed information from their health care providers. CBDSM research addresses end-of-life decision making, shared decision making, and how illness effects happiness.
Health policy research and decision analysis has traditionally been heavily influenced by concepts of economic rationality. We seek to use the insights of decision psychology to better model people's preferences and how they perceive the tradeoffs that are required in allocating health care resources.
One of the largest research foci at CBDSM is the study of risk communication and risk perceptions. Our work considers both how risk is understood by people as well as how risk influences health behavior and medical care.
