The 29th annual meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM) will be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA on October 24-27, 2007. All the relevant detail can be found at http://www.smdm.org.

This is the meeting to attend if you’re interested in medical decision science; presentations typically focus on clinical applications, methodological advances in decision and cost-effectiveness analysis, psychology of medical decision making, and other key topics in clinical and health policy decision science. There are also excellent short courses in the days before the meeting, providing education on MDM topics at a variety of levels (including a course on problem solving for medical educators by George, Frank Kee, and I).

Helpful tip for newcomers to SMDM: You may well find your first meeting overwhelming. The presentations tend to be at a high level and can intimidate people who are just starting to explore medical decision making. Expect this and don’t worry about it. You’ll get a lot of interesting new ideas from your first meeting, and you’ll find that a lot will “click” if you return the following year.