Instructions
Take Another Course
The term “standard of care” is frequently used in healthcare as a way to evaluate and provide appropriate care for patients. In medicine, standard of care is also called “best practice” and supports improved outcomes, and is developed for each clinical condition and subset of circumstances. The clinical definition for “standard of care” is, “A diagnostic and treatment process that a clinician should follow for a certain type of patient, illness, or clinical circumstance (this definition attributed to the New England Journal of Medicine in 2004). It is also defined as, “Treatment that is accepted by medical experts as a proper treatment for a certain type of disease and that is widely used by healthcare professionals”, (as per the National Cancer Institute). An example might be adjuvant chemotherapy for treatment of a lung cancer diagnosis, which could be described as a new standard of care, but not necessarily the only standard of care. Let's start by reviewing our learning objectives.
The Learning Objectives for this course are fairly straightforward. While you may not feel you have a good basic understanding of standards of care, you probably use them in your job everyday. Over the next hour we will bring into focus the concepts behind standards of care, as well as how they are developed, the benchmarks they are based on, and how they are used. The purpose of setting learning objectives at the beginning of the course is to set the framework and goals for the information we will cover.
1. Describe three uses for "Standards of Care". This is fairly straightforward, but until we have a good understanding of what the standards of care are, we can’t assign them appropriate uses. 2. Give an example of how standards of care can be applied to diabetes. We will examine what standards of care have been developed for diabetes, and how they are applied to that disease state. 3. Describe the process of how standards of care are developed. As we will see, there is more to establishing appropriate and effective standards of care than would appear to be the case.
Medical Definition Generally speaking then, a standard of care is an informal or formal guideline that is generally accepted in the medical community for the treatment of a specific disease or condition. Some of the specialist medical organizations develop or recognize these and award the title “standard of care” themselves. Standard of care can also be a clinical practice guideline, or a formal diagnostic and treatment process which the medical providers follow for a patient with a specific set of symptoms, or illness. That standard, then, formalizes the guidelines and protocols that experts would agree are most appropriate, and is also called "best practice." Standards of care can be developed in a couple of different ways. They can be developed over time through trial and error, or they can be put in practice through the methodologies used in clinical trial findings which have been shown to achieve the best results.
Clinical practice guidelines are collected and organized by the National Guideline Clearinghouse. This allows medical professionals to access them and stay current on what the standard of care for a particular symptom or condition is for their geographic area. And geographic are is important--it’s important to note that a standard of care in one community may not be the same as in another. Also, it’s worth noting that one doctor's standard or care can be different from another’s. However, in the past 20 years courts have held physicians and hospitals to national standards of care rather than the accepted local variations of those standards.
The National Guideline Clearinghouse’s online warehouse of these clinical practice guidelines can be found at www.guideline.gov. You can browse through them to see what the standard of care is for a particular disease, condition, treatment or intervention, as well as searching the health services administration website. This website is maintained by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. |
