Approaches to Evidence-Based Management and Decision-Making in Healthcare Organizations: Lessons for Developing Nations

Abstract

Decision-making is an essential process that everyone takes upon at all times. Healthcare managers make decisions to ensure serving high quality of patient care, reduce costs and allocate resources. Evidence based decision making in healthcare has recently received a lot of attention by all health care stakeholders including clinicians, researchers, managers and policy makers. However, it is more adapted by clinicians and researchers than managers and policy makers. Evidence-Based science began to develop in the early 90s and was later named “Evidence Based Medicine” after its methods have been applied in health-related fields. Yet, Evidence Based Management still showing a slow progress in terms of its application in decision-making in practice worldwide. This chapter seeks to examine the key aspects of decision-making in the health care settings. It further seeks to provide key examples of decision-making and ways to seek evidence, types of evidence, and approaches to making evidence-based decisions.