CHDS at SMDM

The 42nd annual meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM) was conducted virtually throughout the month of October and included more than a dozen presentations by CHDS faculty, postdocs, and students. Themed “Relationships in Decision Making,” the meeting offered short courses, symposia, oral abstracts, and poster presentations presenting cutting-edge research in medical decision making.

The meeting began with an overview of SMDM’s COVID-19 modeling initiative, including work from CHDS adjunct faculty, Uwe Siebert and Myriam Hunink. Short courses, half-day, in-depth interactive workshops, included two co-led by Siebert: “Introduction to Medical Decision Making” and “Causal Inference and Causal Diagrams in Medical Decision Making.”

The virtual format of the meeting paired pre-recorded symposia with live question and answer or live panel sessions on each Tuesday of the month, three of which featured CHDS faculty. Ankur Pandya served as a panelist in “Lessons to Serve A Growing Purpose of Economic Evaluation in the United States”; Eve Wittenberg served as a panelist for “Intergenerational Decision Making: The Role of Family Relationships in Medical Decision Making”; and Jane Kim participated in a live panel discussion on “Building Relationships with Policymakers.”

The annual meeting also included more than 100 pre-recorded presentations of research abstracts, including work from Emily Burger, Jenny Spencer, Allison Portnoy, and CHDS students John Giardina, Jinyi Zhu, and Emma Clarke-Deelder. Both Zhu and Clarke-Deelder were finalists for the Lee B. Lusted Student Research Award. Finally, the meeting ended with presentation of awards, including honoring Milton Weinstein for his significant contributions to the field of Applied Health Economics, and the election of new officers, with affiliated faculty Natasha Stout serving as the new President, taking the reins from adjunct faculty Lisa Prosser.

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