Measuring Quality of Surgical Care: Is It Attainable?

Self Cite

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Financial Impact of Breast Reconstruction on an Academic Surgical Practice

Alderman

Storey

Nair

et al. 2009

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“…It may be difficult to start the process but it is a skill that improves with practice and persistence. EBM is a new direction in American medicine 21 and will be used for quality improvement efforts in the US 22 By applying EBM principles to integrate with physician experiences, we should be able to provide better care for our patients by eliminating idiosyncrasies in our treatments.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing Good Clinical Questions and Finding the Best Evidence to Answer Those Questions

Burns

Chung

2010

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Evidence based medicine (EBM) involves the integration of the best scientific evidence available with physician experience and patient preferences. One of the first steps in EBM involves developing a question based on issues encountered with patients or a disease and finding evidence to answer the question. This paper is a guide to plastic surgeons in how to begin the practice of EBM by developing clinical questions and finding evidence to answer these questions.

“…In contrast with a long-adhered tradition of treating patients with practices based on rigidly-held protocols learned in residency training or opinions presented by leaders in the field, EBM challenges these unscientific methods of healthcare delivery and strives to remove the uncertainty of these “expert” opinions. It carefully scrutinizes existing treatments by identifying the best available evidence (4, 5). Table 1 illustrates the five basic ideas of EBM.…”

Section: What Is Evidence-based Medicine?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Introducing Evidence-Based Medicine to Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery

Chung

Swanson

Schmitz

et al. 2009

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130

An effective healthcare system is one in which healthcare spending provides acceptable returns in terms of health outcomes and broad coverage for its citizens. By this measure, the United States healthcare system unfortunately falls short. Tremendous pressure for improvement has given rise to several initiatives designed to decrease healthcare expenditure and improve outcomes, access, and quality of care. The outcomes movement, which is revolutionary in American medicine, has heightened awareness about the need to critically examine our treatment outcomes. However, the early euphoria surrounding the outcomes movement was met with restraint at the realization of its limitations. Although the outcomes movement has verified the effectiveness of many existing treatments in plastic surgery, most of the investments in these projects unfortunately have resulted in few, if any, positive changes for the patient, physician or healthcare system (1). US healthcare is now moving towards the adoption of evidence-based medicine (EBM), which may potentially be another revolution in American healthcare (2).