Expanding disease definitions are causing more and more previously healthy people to be labelled as diseased, contributing to the problem of overdiagnosis and related overtreatment. Often the specialist guideline panels which expand definitions have close tis to industry and do not investigate the harms of defining more people as sick. Responding to growing calls to address these problems, an international group of leading researchers and clinicians is proposing a new way to set diagnostic thresholds and mark the boundaries of condition definitions, to try to tackle a key driver of overdiagnosis and overtreatment. The group proposes new evidence-informed principles, with new process and new people constituting new multidisciplinary panels, free from financial conflicts of interest.
The detailed analysis of the chronic care plans developed by the Spanish regional health services show a surprising level of uniformity in their design and deployment, despite differences between these services. The reviews about theoretical models that support it and tools they develop does not provide conclusive evidence to support the chronic care models achieve better results than another alternatives of care. Although the whole Spanish chronic care plans includes assessment proposals no rigorous studies on their effect have been published to date. Given that, on the contrary, there is a strong and repeated evidence that health systems with Primary Care high performance obtains better outcomes, it is necessary to ask about the need to look for alternative models, when the proposed goals could be reached strengthen Primary Care.
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