Considering Family Resources When Making Medical Recommendations

Considering Product Family Assets when Defining Customer Requirements

The success of a product family heavily depends on the degree of reuse achieved when developing product family based customer specific applications. If a significant amount of the customer requirements can be realized by using the communality and the variability defined for the product family, the reuse level is high; if not, the reuse level is low. In this paper we elaborate on the influence o...

Preliminary and incomplete Resources, Composition and Family Decision-Making*

Medical Decision Making: The Family–Doctor–Patient Triad

Fawad Aslam, Omar Aftab, Naveed Z. Janjua The importance of a person-centred approach and the intricacies of risk communication have recently been well described in PLoS Medicine [1,2]. The applicability of the patient-centred approach to Eastern countries, however, has cultural, religious, and practical impediments that demand careful consideration. The bulk of the world population lives outsi...

Demystifying the "Sunk Cost Fallacy": When Considering Fixed Cost in Decision-Making is Reasonable

Economic theory explains that when making decisions, historical costs should be irrelevant. When people are influenced by sunk costs in their decision-making, they are said to be committing the “sunk cost fallacy”, summarized by Kelly (2004) as the conjunction of two claims: (1) individuals often do give weight to sunk costs in their decision-making, and (2) it is irrational for them to do so. ...

Considering age when making treatment decisions in the ICU: too little, too much, or just right?

There are a number of studies providing evidence that age is associated with treatment decisions for critically ill adults, although most of these studies have been unable to fully account for both prehospital health status and severity of acute illness. In the previous issue of Critical Care, Turnbull and colleagues present a well-executed study analyzing data from a prospective cohort study o...