Blog

Interesting article in Wired recently published on their website featuring how to use a decision tree for health. There is a simple example of a decision tree where you can answer questions about your own health, leading to a recommendation of further information to read.

Further into the article is a discussion of three different patients showing decision trees around their particular health issue.

What we found interesting in the article (apart from the decision tree and topic itself) was the  description of decision trees:

"A decision tree is a simple idea — many of us learned to draw them (in the form of flowcharts) in elementary school. And decision trees are already all around us. They’re common in engineering and industry, where they’re known as algorithms. The pharmaceutical industry uses them to plan safe clinical trials. Financial-service quants use them to root out credit card fraud. They’re even used by city planners to design street patterns and map bus routes. In these cases, decision trees can be complicated tools, laden with mathematics and computer science.

But they needn’t be only for the experts. In an age of too much information and too little illumination, a decision tree can be a tool that nudges any of us to think through our options and to act consciously and with consideration. A decision tree can be as straightforward as a list of the pros and cons of a particular option that we complete before we act."