Institute:Office of National Coordinator (ONC) Workforce Training Curriculum
Component:The Culture of Health Care
Unit:Evidence-Based Practice
Lecture:Phrasing the clinical question
Harm and prognosis
Slide content:Pure Prognosis Studies Are Rare Prognosis is natural history of disease But very little history is natural in modern era with our abundance of diagnostic tests, interventions, harmful agents, and so on Many studies measure prognosis after a test or intervention 11
Slide notes:11 Lets make a few comments about prognosis [ prog - noh -sis] . One of the important things to know about prognosis is that its actually hard to do a good prognosis study because prognosis is the natural history of a diseasehow the disease actually unfolds. In this day and age, theres very little in the history of a disease that is natural. In almost every disease, we intervene in some way, whether through diagnostic tests or treatments. Many studies end up measuring prognosis after some form of test or intervention. We may measure prognosis for a group of patients who have been diagnosed with a certain condition, or we may measure prognosis for a group of individuals who have been given a certain treatment for a particular condition. When we start to do that, the differences between a prognosis study and a treatment study start to blur a little bit.