Some considerations on the estimation of the value associated to a clinical act

Abstract

The assignment of a value to any economic system, especially in healthcare management, is the topic of this article. The assignment of a value to a clinical act is a very complex process, as it joins the complexity of estimating value in an economic system with the estimation of the value of well-being. An interdisciplinary approach joining disciplines such as Philosophy, Business, Psychology and Physics is used to analyse the assignment of a value; and it is obtained that it is necessary the integrated use of three concepts; viz., Truth, Good, and Beauty. It is also obtained that the concept of Beauty has the biggest difficulty in being computationally represented, and that to achieve such representation it is necessary the use of Statistical Philosophy, a here-proposed branch of the Philosophy of Information. Moreover, it is obtained that value is made of three types of value; viz., Truth-value, Good-value, and Beauty-value. Finally, it is made an assessment of the difficulty in choosing the appropriate necessary projection of the 3-vector value into a worthiness-scalar, a projection that is necessary because the choice of a best option, e.g. a best clinical act, always requires that the option is quantified by a scalar. (C) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.