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Today's focus on healthcare expenditures has prompted renewed interest in examining clinical practice and methods to maintain safety and improve outcomes while reducing costs. Various tools have been developed to alter clinician behavior, where needed, to achieve these goals. Investigators recently conducted a prospective, randomized trial at two tertiary care hospitals in Spain to evaluate the effect of a critical pathway on management and outcomes of patients with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). The pathway had three steps:
Early mobilization of patients
Use of objective criteria for switching from intravenous to oral antibiotics
Use of predefined criteria for deciding on hospital discharge
Immunocompetent adults who were diagnosed with C…