Assessing health policy strategies: a model-based approach to decision support

The problems of making strategic decisions in relation to health policy, where there is the need to strive for both acceptability and cost-effectiveness, constitute major challenges be the decisions local, regional or national. In such a context alternative scenarios need to be generated, and then assessed and evaluated, in order that an appropriate decision can be made. In this paper an approach to supporting such decision making is presented which combines systems-based cybernetic modelling for scenario analysis with a Bayesian method for assessment and evaluation