Abstract
Time-related problems interfere with treatment decisions and evaluations in health care, both from the perspective of the doctor and from the perspective of the patient. The compliance level of the patient and subsequent evaluations in clinical practice might be affected by a discrepancy in the time perspective. Context factors related to time and health perspectives are relevant to clinical decisions and quality management. A summary of evaluation factors in quality management is presented: (a) the time perspective of the patient is different from the time perspective of the doctor, both in an objective and in a subjective manner; (b) disease chronicity chronic affects the perception of time; (c) assessments need to extend over a period sufficiently long for variations in a disease activity to be noticed; (d) there is variation both in time for an outcome to occur and in time span for that outcome; (e) the number of patients benefiting from certain drugs and variability over time is valuable information; (f) the outcome of a specified treatment could be estimated for different periods in a sequence; and (g) changes occur in judgments and decisions over time both for the doctor and for the patient.