Targeting Quality Improvement in Clinical Practice Guidelines

Abstract

Clinical practice guidelines provide key action statements targeted at quality improvements. Areas of potential quality improvement can be identified by exploring known contributors to cognitive errors. Three common contributors to medical error and reduced quality care are (1) the complexity of modern medicine, (2) the tendency to apply cause and effect to random associations, and (3) our bias to our first intuition. Future authors of clinical practice guidelines should consider these 3 influences when deciding how to best provide guidance to improve patient care.

Keywords: clinical practice guidelines; cognitive error; medical error; quality improvement.