Practice guidelines and clinical risk assessment models: is it time to reform?

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making

Debate

Mohammad Hosein Rahimi-Rad¹  Firouz Ghaderi Pakdel²  Shahrzad Bazargan-Hejazi³  Nariman Sepehrvand⁴  Babak Moosavi-Toomatari⁴ 

[1] Department of Internal Medicine, Imam-Khomeini Training Hospital, Urmia University of Medical Sciences, Iran;Department of Physiology, Urmia University of Medical Sciences, Iran;Department of Psychiatry, Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science, & David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, CA90059, Los Angeles, USA;Students' Research Committee, Urmia University of Medical Sciences, Iran;

关键词: Practice guidelines;    Risk assessment models;    Fuzzy Logic;    Venous Thromboembolism;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1472-6947-11-63

 received in 2011-01-04, accepted in 2011-10-18,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundClinical practice guidelines and Risk Assessment Models (RAMs) are some useful tools to bring medical evidences into our daily clinical practice. Despite the improvement over the time, they still have some shortcomings.DiscussionOne of these shortcomings is the arbitrary cutoffs used in these tools to facilitate the decision making process. This problem is to some extent due to the "Black or White" approach of modern medicine in making the decisions, whilst in the real world and our daily practice we used mostly an uncertain approach, which is called recently as "Fuzzy" thinking approach.SummaryThe authors of this article believe that the fuzzy type of thinking may resolve the above mentioned shortcomings of clinical practice guideline or risk assessment models and they tried to discuss about this using an example about Venous Thromboembolism related guidelines and RAMs.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Sepehrvand et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011