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Decision Making Process in Action According to Webster's Dictionary the definition of "decision" is the "1. a: act or process of deciding b: a determination arrived at after consideration: CONCLUSION." (http://www.m-w.com/). Organizations and individuals make decisions every day. Decisions are made by flipping a coin, taking a guess, thinking about the thoughts and feelings of others, considering values and beliefs, complying with a mission statement, or picking a solution with more positive than negative consequences. In order to understand the decision making process, we have to look at exactly what goes in that process and apply it to a real world work situation. According to the Management Mentor there are 5 major steps in the decision-making process. By outlining the steps and applying them to a data capture problem in Safety we can see the process in action and how important critical thinking is to the process.

Step One: Identify the problem and the criteria to be met (www.themanagementor.com). Misdiagnosing a problem can result in bad decisions. Evaluating the problem in a new perspective helps decision-makers think out of the box. Another issue in identifying problems is that sometimes symptoms are identified and not the actual cause of the problem. Decisions can end up biased against the wrong aspects of a process. In the Safety redesign, departments were divided by pre-market and post-market trials. Further division occurred by breaking up collection in therapeutic areas. A data capture process is the perfect choice to illustrate step one. In medical trials, if a patient has an "adverse event," which can be anything from a cold to cardiac arrest, it is reported to the company. The number of these events needs to be gathered monthly to report to the Medical Directors in the therapeutic areas. It was a time consuming manual process of hand counting the adverse events that Safety received.

On-demand data was impossible to get...