Quality of care in inflammatory bowel disease.

Advances in the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) are published routinely in medical journals. Some treatments are sufficiently helpful that their conclusions are incorporated into clinical guidelines. However, such publications and proclamations may go unheeded among practitioners. Underuse, overuse, and misuse of clinical therapeutics, diagnostics, and routine medical processes are sufficiently prevalent among IBD practitioners that movements are afoot to determine the best methods for achieving a minimal uniformity of effective care. Such explorations are part of an effort to improve the quality of care. In this article, we review the background that has led to a push toward quality improvements in medicine in general, in gastroenterology in general, and within IBD specifically.