Abstract

BackgroundDiagnosis is the traditional basis for decision-making in clinical practice. Evidence is often lacking about future benefits and harms of these decisions for patients diagnosed with and without disease. We propose that a model of clinical practice focused on patient prognosis and predicting the likelihood of future outcomes may be more useful.DiscussionDisease diagnosis can provide crucial information for clinical decisions that influence outcome in serious acute illness. However, the central role of diagnosis in clinical practice is challenged by evidence that it does not always benefit patients and that factors other than disease are important in determining patient outcome. The concept of disease as a dichotomous ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is challenged by the frequent use of diagnostic indicators with continuous distributions, such as blood sugar, which are better understood as contributing information about the probability of a patient’s future outcome. Moreover, many illnesses, such as chronic fatigue, cannot usefully be labelled from a disease-diagnosis perspective. In such cases, a prognostic model provides an alternative framework for clinical practice that extends beyond disease and diagnosis and incorporates a wide range of information to predict future patient outcomes and to guide decisions to improve them. Such information embraces non-disease factors and genetic and other biomarkers which influence outcome.SummaryPatient prognosis can provide the framework for modern clinical practice to integrate information from the expanding biological, social, and clinical database for more effective and efficient care.

Highlights

  • Diagnosis is the traditional basis for decision-making in clinical practice

  • Summary: Patient prognosis can provide the framework for modern clinical practice to integrate information from the expanding biological, social, and clinical database for more effective and efficient care

  • Diagnosis was regarded as the primary guide to treatment and prognosis (“what is likely to happen in the future”), and is still considered the core component of clinical practice [2]

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Summary

Discussion

A useful diagnosis is defined by patient prognosis Diagnosis classifies sick people into groups defined by disease and pathology [10]. Primary care practitioners undertake initial triage in a diagnostic framework to identify rare underlying conditions which have a poor immediate prognosis unless treated (e.g., cord compression from a tumour) Once these are excluded, the task diverts from diagnosis and considers the clinical problem as the risk of poor long-term outcomes (work loss, persistent pain). Use of this prognostic approach to select back pain patients for different treatment programmes was effective and cost effective in a randomised controlled trial [40] Such personalised medicine is likely to herald preferential expansion of prognostic modelling of individual risk for future health outcomes over new diagnostic tests of current disease status.

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