Introducing MDM Policy & Practice

The Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM) has launched a new online-only, open-access journal, MDM Policy & Practice (MDM P&P). This new journal will publish rigorous and systematic applications of decision science that are designed to improve the health and clinical care of individuals and to inform health policy development.

What We Learn from Practice

Policy and practice is about people. The fundamental nature of applied science is to direct the developments in our theory and methods toward improving the human condition. In application, we squarely face a pressing problem and turn our tools toward its solution—perhaps only a partial solution, or a solution for a time, but a measurable improvement in welfare. Application is inherently translational and collaborative, requiring the combined efforts of different fields of knowledge and skill and demanding the special virtue of speaking clearly across professions and vocations.

This process makes applied work highly motivating. Most, if not all, of us would be pleased to engage in activities that help others. And yet, working in the “real world” can be extremely challenging and often takes the form of incremental, rather than revolutionary, advances. As a consequence of the need to balance the good we want to do for individuals and societies with existing (rather than utopian) health-care delivery, payment, and policymaking mechanisms, applied work must sometimes compromise the elegance of generality in favor of specificity in the service of measurable impact. Actual features of the problem become important considerations. For example, consider the extent to which a choice is irrevocable. Does the individual decision maker have the opportunity to revisit a decision? Can a policy, once enacted, be responsive to new data? What are the opportunity costs of doing so, for this decision at this time? At the same time, applications not only attempt to solve a real problem as currently presented but also to point out what we need to know next and what we need to do next to get more of what we seek.

In the real world, patients, physicians, policy makers, and persons are in some ways fundamentally the same and in other ways deeply different. Solving problems in policy and practice demands attention both to those similarities, which provide the economies of generalization that allow us to apply, for example, concepts of psychology to individual or policy decisions about cancer screening, and to those differences, which prevent us from wrongly assuming that a single solution may be the correct or only approach.

MDM P&P seeks to provide a venue for the dissemination of these solutions.

Journal Scope

MDM P&P focuses on the application of current theories, methods, and approaches from a variety of disciplines to important problems facing clinical and health policy decision makers, including patients, providers, policy makers, and payers.

MDM P&P focuses on important topics such as

• Optimal strategies for patient care and policy decision making for specific health conditions

• Approaches to improving individual and group medical decision-making processes

• Shared decision making and patient decision support

• Decision and cost-effectiveness analyses

• Health technology assessment

• Examples of teaching decision making

The editors are most interested in manuscripts that are exemplary applications of widely accepted methods to important problems.

MDM P&P will publish original research articles, reviews, case studies, letters to the editor, and editorials. For more information, please see http://mdm.uic.edu.

MDM and MDM P&P

Although SMDM’s original journal, Medical Decision Making (MDM), publishes (and will continue to publish) applied research that advances the theory and methods of decision science, MDM P&P focuses more squarely on research that addresses current problems in health care. If one wants to report the impact of a patient decision aid for lung cancer screening, the cost-effectiveness of a new heart valve, or health-state valuations for a new population, MDM P&P may be a better fit. If one wants to compare methods for conducting value-clarification exercises, better modeling of survival curves, or the impact of new utility theories on health-state valuation, consider MDM instead. Authors who remain unsure of which SMDM journal they should submit their work to may opt in for consideration by both journals during manuscript submission.

MDM and MDM P&P share a common editorial board, associate editors, deputy editor, and editor-in-chief. Both journals are managed from the same editorial office using the same manuscript submission software, which makes it possible for editors to offer to transfer submissions that would be rejected from one journal but could be better suited for the other. The editors expect MDM P&P to be indexed in Google Scholar shortly after it begins publishing. Indexing in MEDLINE requires 12 months of continuous publication and the publication of 40 articles; once accepted for indexing, all articles are indexed by MEDLINE retroactively.

Open Access

MDM P&P publishes using a fully open-access model in which authors of all manuscripts accepted for publication pay an article-processing charge (APC). All published articles are freely available to all readers online only; MDM P&P does not publish in print. Open access enables articles to receive broader and more diverse visibility and citation than is typically possible with more traditional, subscription-based publishing. APCs are discounted for SMDM members. In addition, during the first 2 years of publication, member and nonmember APCs will be further discounted.

Looking Forward

MDM has established itself as a highly credible outlet for new work in the medical decision sciences. I look forward to following MDM P&P as researchers use those sciences to solve our pressing problems.