Medical Decision-Making

Our decision-scientists, physicians and researchers examine evidence-based outcomes using data and cost-effectiveness analyses to promote better health policy outcomes. Working closely with the Society for Medical Decision Making, SHP researchers propose standards to help guide physicians and their patients, as well as state and federal policymakers who set those standards in legislation. Many of our faculty are also investigators and clinicians at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System and have published hundreds of studies in medical journals about the best clinical practices.

Douglas K. Owens, MD, PhD,  a professor of health policy and chair of the Department of Health Policy at the School of Medicine and Center for Health Policy in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, is an expert in the field of medical decision-making. Owens was the chair of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of national experts in prevention and evidence-based medicine who issue guidelines that impact every primary care physician and patient in the United States. He was instrumental in developing some of the annual Task Force reports to Congress that identify critical evidence gaps in research related to clinical prevention services. A general internist and professor of medicine at Stanford, Owens is nationally recognized for his research into the cost-effectiveness of early HIV prevention in the developing world.

Other faculty focused on medical decision making include Joshua Salomon, PhD, who focuses on measurements and valuation of health outcomes, trends in major causes of global mortality and disease and the evaluation of health interventions and policies. Salomon, a professor of health policy, developed a new calculation to better measure progress toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals and is the founding director of the Prevention Policy Modeling Lab, which evaluates the health impact, costs, and cost-effectiveness of infectious disease treatment and prevention programs in the United States.

Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert, PhD, combines simulation modeling methods and cost-effectiveness analyses with econometric approaches and behavioral economic studies to address such issues as the complex policy decisions surrounding the prevention and management of increasingly common, chronic diseases and the life course impact of exposure to their risk factors. He helped establish the Stanford-CIDE Coronavirus Simulation Model (SC-COSMO) during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a project that remains at the forefront of dozens of projection models in the United States and Mexico, while helping the state of California and its prisons system, hospitals and health-care providers plan for and mitigate the impact of the pandemic.