Doctors cannot keep up with guidelines
The title of the paper – Inefficacy of different strategies to improve guideline awareness – says it all. Here is the abstract:
In spite of numerous guidelines for evidence based diagnostic and therapy adequate knowledge of current recommendations is disappointingly low. In the Hypertension Evaluation Project (HEP I) we showed that awareness of national hypertension guidelines under German practitioners was less than 25% in the year 2000. This indicates the need for efficient strategies to relevantly improve guideline awareness.
For doctors, there is simply too much information to keep track of and the information never appears when you need it, i.e. when you are about to do something with your patient.
I think it is time to rethink the workflow. It is time to push this information out to the person who cares about it the most, i.e. the patient. It is why I am starting my new company, Patients Know Best. Watch this space.
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