Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis for Health Care Decision Making—Emerging Good Practices: Report 2 of the ISPOR MCDA Emerging Good Practices Task Force

Health care decisions are complex and involve confronting trade-offs between multiple, often conflicting objectives. Using structured, explicit approaches to decisions involving multiple criteria can improve the quality of decision making. A set of techniques, known under the collective heading multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA), are useful for this purpose. In 2014, ISPOR established an Emerging Good Practices Task Force. An earlier task force report defined MCDA, provided examples of its use in health care, described the key steps, and provided an overview of the principal methods of MCDA. This second task force report provides emerging good-practice guidance on the implementation of MCDA to support health care decisions, including a checklist to support the design, implementation, and review of an MCDA; guidance to support the implementation of the checklist, the order in which the steps should be implemented, and incorporating budget constraints into an MCDA; an overview of the skills and resources required to implement MCDA, including the available software; and future research directions.