Practice Guidelines: Can They Save Money? Should They?

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Abstract
To achieve lower medical spending with as little reduction as possible in good outcomes, practitioners and policy makers alike have been experimenting with the use of practice guidelines. These guidelines both recommend certain types of therapies and proscribe others in the treatment of patients with particular conditions. This paper explores the question of whether guidelines which do reduce total resource costs of medical care to a population will (1) be feasible and (2) produce “acceptable” results. The definition ofacceptableis part of the policy problem, so it will be left open for a while, but the question of which outcomes match with which levels of resource cost will form the positive basis for the normative judgment of “acceptability.”