Legal Implications of Medical Practice Guidelines

What Medical Practice Guidelines Are

Medical practice standards, policies, parameters, or guidelines are specific statements of what should or should not be done in particular clinical circumstances. Most have been developed by professional specialty organizations for use by practitioners. Increasingly, practice standards use the results of outcomes research in establishing general guidelines for preventing, diagnosing, or treating certain clinical conditions. Many observers believe that the primary value of outcomes assessment is its potential to produce the data necessary to develop medical practice guidelines that will improve the practice of medicine and, consequently, patient health outcomes.

Theoretically, outcomes assessment can offer a data base for deciding what works and how and when to use it. Only a small proportion of medical services, however, have been subjected to rigorous testing to determine their actual effectiveness or relative merit compared with alternatives.

The Institute of Medicine defines practice guidelines as "systematically developed

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alities of persuasion are minimized. 4. The fourth objective is to assure that both the developed consensus and exceptions to consensus are included in the article publicizing the practice guideline. Legal Implications Associated With the Use of Medical Practice Guidelines Historically, tort law was conceived not to remedy all the misfortunes of life, but specifically to require that if careless conduct causes harm, the perpetrator will make whole those he has injured. Concepts of fault and causality, thus, are embedded in traditional tort law. Some observers suggest, however, that recent developments in tort law deviate significantly from this perception. In a variety of settings, these observers assert that courts appear to implement an economic theory as opposed to a fault-based theory, in which liability is ascribed according to economic analyses of who is best situated to reduce the risk of accident, and which accidents are financially worth averting. In this context, according to the critics of the contemporary process, courts have been willing to ascribe liability and assess damages that bear little proportion to the defendant's degree of fault. As an example, causes of action have expanded to encompass emotional
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Approximate Word count = 5520
Approximate Pages = 22 (250 words per page)

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