U.S. Department of Health and Human ServicesHHS National Institutes of HealthNIH National Center for Advancing Translational SciencesNCATS
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Establish Clinical Sites

Clinical Care Networks

Establishing certain hospitals as Clinical Care Centers of Excellence for your disease can increase the quality of care every patient receives. In many cases, the diagnostic criteria, clinical care guidelines, and measures to monitor disease progression have not yet been established. Clinicians and staff at the Centers can develop these important elements, forge relationships with patients and their families, and increase the readiness for performing clinical trials when a new therapy is developed.

Advantages to having clinical centers include:

  • Diagnostic criteria can be developed and published to clearly define the patient population and decrease time to diagnosis.
  • Clinical care guidelines (standards of care) can make certain that patients with your disease are receiving the best medical care no matter where they live.
  • New clinicians and staff can be trained at established Centers, as well as at future Centers.
  • Clinical measures can be developed to track changing clinical outcomes overtime.
  • Strong relationships between patients and their families and the clinicians and staff at Centers can increase the medical and quality of life knowledge about your disease.
  • Clinical Centers of Excellence can work together as a network to collect medical data, perform natural history studies,  establish and validate clinical outcome measures, and help design clinical trials.