María Taboada** Knowledge Eng. Applied to Medicine

Clinical practice guidelines (CPG) represent standard sets of recommendations for the clinical handling of patient affections of a concrete pathology. They reflect the best scientific evidence available for such pathology. Its adoption by health-care professionals has a direct impact in the quality of the assistance, fostering the standardization of the interventions. In spite of the interest of their application and use, the adherence of professionals to CPG has been observed below the desirable level. Two are the main reasons: 1) the difficulty to adapt standard CPGs to the particularities of each health care center and 2) the little synchrony between CPGs and the particularities of work practices that often reflect the specifics of work places. Both factors influence negatively in the viewpoint of doctors and other health care professionals, making them reluctant to use CPGs in the clinical decision making. Regardless of the reason, this poor adherence lowers the quality of the health service provided. In order to solve this, more operative versions of CPGs have set out: Care Pathways (CPs). These are operative versions of the CPGs that detail the steps to follow for the care of a disease in a certain segment of patients and concrete healthcare context. Therefore, CPs constitute a fundamental instrument for th