Management of Suspected Lower-Extremity Deep Venous Thrombosis
- 27 February 1995
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Medical Association (AMA) in Archives of internal medicine (1960)
- Vol. 155 (4) , 426
- https://doi.org/10.1001/archinte.1995.00430040102013
Abstract
In the course of developing a new technique for medical decision making, we used the data from an article that appeared in theArchives1as the basis for a decision model. Our results did not agree with the published results1for several of the management strategies. For example, our software (and decision trees drawn by hand) indicated that the expected cost of strategy A ("No tests or treatment") was $1905, not $2220 as published. Our decision-tree representation of strategy A (Figure 1) and one that explains the study1results (Figure 2) are enclosed. The mortality and cost of several other strategies differ from our calculations as well. In fact, our analysis, which evaluated a superset of the 24 strategies evaluated by Hillner et al1showed that, with the article's "standard model" assumptions, the most cost-effective management strategy is not strategy I ("If real-time ultrasonography [RUS] suggests deepThis publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: