Individualized Guidelines
The current situation
Clinical guidelines are an important tool government organizations have used to standardize treatments, improve quality of care, and lower costs. Traditional guidelines, however, have significant limitations. They:
- Are based on population averages
- Generally focus on a single condition
- Use sharp cutoffs to determine who is and who isn’t a candidate for treatment
- Omit many important risk factors and co-morbidities
As such, traditional guidelines may not provide optimal treatment recommendations for individual patients.
Individualized guidelines
Individualized guidelines1 take into account all of an individual’s information (e.g., lab values, biomarkers, demographics, history, medications, etc.) and can be used to design a care plan tailored to the needs of that patient. Individualized guidelines can also take into account the continuous nature of risk factors and expected benefit from treatments.
How you can use the Archimedes Model
Archimedes IndiGO. Archimedes IndiGO is the first decision support tool that was designed to create individualized guidelines. It resides on a physician’s or care manager’s computer and creates recommendations that are tailored to a person’s individual biomarkers, risk factors, and current treatments.
IndiGO takes into account more than 30 patient-specific variables and determines both the patient’s current risk profile and the reduction in risk provided by specific interventions. More about IndiGO
Contact us for more information.
1Individualized Guidelines: The Potential for Increasing Quality and Reducing Costs. Eddy DM, et. al., Annals of Internal Medicine, May 2 2011, vol. 154 no. 9 627-634.
