Evidence-based medicine is fast overtaking experience-based medicine in the field of healthcare delivery. Outcomes analysis allows the assessment of the quality of care delivered and matches them against the resource costs.
Education for healthcare professions, individual clinical expertise means the proficiency and judgment that individual clinicians acquire through clinical experience and clinical practice.
Increased education for healthcare professions is reflected in many ways, but especially in more effective and efficient diagnosis and in the more thoughtful identification and compassionate use of individual patients’ predicaments, rights, and preferences in making clinical decisions about their care.
It is mandatory that the whole medical community takes responsibility and tries to reverse this apparently inexorable process so to re-establish a proper evidence-based care, where patients and their healing relation with practitioners are at the center and where doctors are able to critically evaluate the available evidence and use it in light of their personal experience and knowledge. Performing evidence-based analytics using the formulae discussed above on just the data collected within an organization can prove to be a real game-changer for many a care setting. Although the analytics are performed on a smaller data set than in a typical clinical research setting, the findings are nevertheless very relevant for that data set. With regional variations and local environmental conditions having varying degrees of impact on the disease processes, health and wellness of individuals, such information can prove to be most helpful for care provider and care receivers alike as personalized medicine can now be practiced more easily, even in the absence of genetic /genomic data.
Without doubt it can be said that changing clinical practices to evidence-based practices is no more just a dream but a very real possibility. The promise of transforming even single-doctor practices into centers of excellence cannot fail to excite even the most skeptic.
