The CARE Checklist: Reporting Guidelines for CAse Reports
David Riley, MD
Format: Video of Slides

Objective: Case reports have helped identify effects from interventions and recognize new or rare diseases. Data from case reports— increasingly published in indexed medical journals, is beginning to be systematically collected and reported. However, the quality of published case reports is uneven. One study evaluated 1,316 case reports from four emergency medicine journals found that over half failed to provide information related to the primary treatment. Case reports, written without reporting guidelines (with the exception of harms), are insufficiently rigorous to guide clinical practice, inform research design, or be aggregated for data analysis. This analysis was conducted to develop and implement systematic reporting guidelines for case reports.

Conclusion: The CARE guidelines have been developed in a consensus-based process and represent essential information necessary to improve the quality of case reports. These guidelines are generic and will need extensions for specific specialties and purposes. Feedback from use of the guidelines in 2013, though positive, is limited. The analysis of systematically aggregated information from patient encounters may provide scalable, data- driven insights into what works for which patients transforming how we think about ‘evidence’ and its creation, diffusion and use.