Clinical Algorithms and Practice Guidelines

Clinical algorithms and practice guidelines may be viewed as a targeted effort to provide the best clinical advice about specific management conditions. They are most useful if clinicians incorporate them as additional tools to specifically improve patient outcomes while offering holistic clinical care to patients.

Clinical Algorithms

Definition

Algorithms are branching-logic pathways that permit the application of carefully defined criteria to the task of identifying or classifying different types of the same entity. Clinical algorithms are often represented as schematic models or flow diagrams of the clinical decision pathway described in a guideline.

Clinical findings, diagnostic test characteristics, and treatment options are abbreviated into their basic components. Algorithmic flow diagrams are then constructed as branching logical pathways with decision points represented as yes/no nodes. Such a flowchart sequence is ...

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