Clinical Policies and the Quality of Clinical Practice

THE quality and cost of medical care depend heavily on the decisions made by physicians. In turn, one of the most important factors influencing physicians is the collection of clinical policies that guide their actions.How does a physician select a diagnostic or therapeutic plan for a patient? Perhaps the most obvious approach is to weigh consciously the consequences of different choices. A physician might identify the possible courses of action, estimate the outcomes that might occur with each action, weigh the value of each outcome by the probability that it would occur, and select the action that had the . . .