Preventive medicine
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Preventive medicine · May 2003
ReviewStatus of practice guidelines in the United States: CDC guidelines as an example.
Clinical practice guidelines have proliferated in the past several decades, starting with only a handful in the 1980s to over 1000 approved through The National Guideline Clearinghouse in 2002. ⋯ An immediate mandate is to ensure that when guidelines are promulgated, they include an evaluation plan, developed by the implementer of the guideline, which takes advantage of existing qualitative and quantitative data and programs (e.g., patient-centered care, quality assurance, risk management) not limited to expensive and sophisticated clinical trials.