Clinical guidelines, clinical pathways and protocols of care

The article points out that the importance of standardization of clinical practices has been established in clinical management, which helps solve the problems of variability by developing documents based on the available scientific evidence. The article claims that healthcare culture has increasingly recognized the importance of standardization of clinical practices and provides a conceptual difference between clinical practice guidelines, protocols and algorithms. Clinical pathways and clinical guidelines are also defined. Clinical guidelines are described by the structure and phases that they contain. Finally, limitations of clinical guidelines are described and recommendations for their use are provided.