Epidemiological strategies for adapting clinical practice guidelines to the needs of multimorbid patients

Description:
Clinical practice guidelines have been developed to improve the quality of health care. However, adherence to current monomorbidity-focused, mono-disciplinary guidelines may result in undesirable effects for persons with several comorbidities, in adverse interactions between drugs and diseases, conflicting management strategies, and polypharmacy. This is why new types of guidelines that address the problem of interacting medical interventions and conditions in multimorbid patients are needed.

How to cite:

Blozik E, Bussche H van den, Gurtner F, Schäfer I, Scherer M. Epidemiological strategies for adapting clinical practice guidelines to the needs of multimorbid patients. BMC Health Services Research. 2013 Sep 16;13(1):352. 

 The epidemiologic approaches described above may help guideline developers as a kind of check list of disease combinations that should systematically be considered during guideline development. Given the risk of worse outcomes in a huge group of vulnerable patients, researchers, guideline developers, and funding institutions should give first priority to the development of guidelines more appropriate for use in multimorbid persons

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