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Using Practice Guideline Compendiums To Provide Better Preventive Care
- Physician's practice patterns
- Physician's role
- Preventive health services
- Guidelines
- Practice guidelines
During the past decade, an increasing number of preventive care and other guidelines have been published in articles and textbooks and on the Internet (1-4). However, with the proliferation of this new and potentially important information, practitioners may become increasingly bewildered in their attempts to sort through the vast number of guidelines and decide which are most appropriate for their patients. The accelerated pace of development has led to an abundance of guidelines created by different organizations with different methods and different objectives (1-4). The quality and rigor of the guidelines vary widely. To address the propagation of preventive care and other guidelines, compendiums have been assembled to organize and integrate existing guideline information into a single source.
I describe 1) the rationale for continued attention to preventive care guidelines, 2) recent efforts to organize existing guidelines, 3) currently available compendiums of preventive care guidelines, 4) how the compendiums may be used in day-to-day practice, and 5) how this information may be used to improve the provision of preventive care.
Rationale for Continued Focus on Preventive Care Guidelines
Despite the plethora of preventive care guidelines, significant gaps remain between appropriate levels of preventive care and levels of preventive care documented in clinical practice (5, 6). Moreover, missed opportunities to provide preventive care can cause substantial human consequences (5, 6). Because researchers believe that 70% of disease is preventable (6, 7), effective implementation of preventive care guidelines can lead to even greater improvements in patient care than the introduction of some new technologies. For example, if a health plan that provides service to 100 000 women between the ages of 50 and 69 years increased mammography rates by approximately 10%, at least 14 lives over 10 years could be saved (8). Additional benefits, including reductions in mortality, morbidity, and suffering, could accrue from …
