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Your Benefit Board wants to offer health plans that give you care that works best. Care that "works best" is care that gets the best results for your health, is safe, and uses health care resources in the most efficient ways. It’s the type of care you want for yourself and your family.
To find out what types of care work best, doctors and others do scientific studies of patient care. The results from this medical research are called "medical evidence."
Each patient is different, but medical research can show whether some types of health care tend to get better results than others for patients with certain conditions.
When there is medical evidence from research that shows which care works best, then your health plan should make sure that evidence is part of "good quality" care.
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"It can be a big worry for us when our little boy gets sick. We want to make sure he gets the right kind of care – the kind that helps him feel better as soon as possible."
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When there is enough medical evidence to know what types of care work best, this evidence can be used to set "quality standards" or "guidelines" for good patient care. Care that follows these standards or guidelines is sometimes called "evidence-based care" because it is based on the evidence that comes from medical research.
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"To give my patients with asthma the best possible care, I follow the national quality guidelines for patients with asthma. These guidelines are based on medical research that was reviewed by leading asthma specialists.
I have a chart that lists all of the guidelines. It’s a handy reminder about all the things that need to happen for good asthma care."
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