Medical Pratice 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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e in litigation, however, but their use in practice·the extent to which guidelines "effectively elevate the quality of care is the measure of success. But whether the work product of a consensus conference is used to improve care quality of the practitioner or as a measure of the adequacy of the defendant's care of a particular patient in a particular set of circumstances, the guidelines need to be both credible and usable." The objective of the consensus statement must be defined clearly. While this function has important implications for the development of perfections in the scientific data over time that may be expected to improve a therapy in the future, the legal implication is also clear·"all the answers are not in. Thus, there is likely room for the clinician to exercise his or her judgment with regard to a specific patient with a specific set of clinical characteristics. The guidelines then are intended to be just that: guidelines. If ideally developed and ideally packaged, these guidelines will be of the greatest use to the greatest number of practitioners in providing safe and effective therapy. As such, they will be optimal guides to the standard of care for the protection of the practitioner from committing ma
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