The development of consensus guidelines for obesity is complex. It involves recommending both treatment interventions and interventions related to screening and prevention. With so many publications and claims, and with the awareness that success for the individual is short-lived, many find it difficult to know what action is appropriate in the management of obesity. Furthermore, the significan...

Implementation of practice guidelines is a beguilingly complex activity that requires attention to the task of clinicians, the constraints they face, and the social practice of medicine. Local clinical opinion leaders can accelerate the pace of change by encouraging early adoption and modeling new practices. "Tough love" approaches to guideline adoption have a role in raising the salience of th...

The Ministry of Health publishes national clinical practice guidelines to provide doctors and patients in Singapore with evidence-based guidance on managing important medical conditions. This article reproduces the introduction and executive summary (with recommendations from the guidelines) from the Ministry of Health clinical practice guidelines on Management of Rhinosinusitis and Allergic Rh...

Clinical practice guidelines abound. The recommendations contained in these guidelines are used not only to make decisions about the care of individual patients but also as practice standards to rate physician "quality." Physicians' confidence in guidelines is based on the supposition that there is a rigorous, objective process for developing recommendations based on the best available evidence...

Pharmacy informatics is defined as the use and integration of data, information, knowledge, technology, and automation in the medication-use process for the purpose of improving health outcomes. The term "big data" has been coined and is often defined in three V's: volume, velocity, and variety. This paper describes three major areas in which pharmacy utilizes big data, including: 1) informed d...

Background: Quality systems are believed to be positively related to quality and safety in healthcare. However, there is no convincing evidence for this relationship in the literature. This study aims to examine the association between the development stage of hospital quality systems and the implementation of patient safety themes at the process level. Methods: This study combines data from a ...

Clinical practice guidelines are useful in improving quality of care and outcomes, reducing inappropriate variation in practice, promoting efficient use of resources, informing and empowering patients and informing public policy. However, difficulties arise when guidelines are poorly introduced into routine daily practice and, as a consequence, many patients do not receive the care intended or ...

I feel that it is important to know the stories behind those who are working hard in the field to bring forward massage therapy research. Interviews with massage therapy researchers will now occasionally be included in the Journal as a new editorial feature. The first interview is with Virginia S. Cowen, PhD, LMT a New York State-licensed and NCB board-certified massage therapist with a PhD fro...

The definition of overtreatment of rectal cancer is controversial, and thus it is difficult to accurately quantitate its prevalence. All components of rectal cancer treatment are associated with significant potential for morbidity and dysfunction that may have a negative impact on the patient's quality of life. No one would disagree with the tenet that overtreatment should be avoided whenever p...