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BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
Published in: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 1/2011

Open Access 01-12-2011 | Debate

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

Authors: Nariman Sepehrvand, Firouz Ghaderi Pakdel, Mohammad Hosein Rahimi-Rad, Babak Moosavi-Toomatari, Shahrzad Bazargan-Hejazi

Published in: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making | Issue 1/2011

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Abstract

Background

Clinical 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.

Discussion

One 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.

Summary

The 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.
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Metadata
Title
Practice guidelines and clinical risk assessment models: is it time to reform?
Authors
Nariman Sepehrvand
Firouz Ghaderi Pakdel
Mohammad Hosein Rahimi-Rad
Babak Moosavi-Toomatari
Shahrzad Bazargan-Hejazi
Publication date
01-12-2011
Publisher
BioMed Central
Published in
BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making / Issue 1/2011
Electronic ISSN: 1472-6947
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6947-11-63

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