What are the CARE guidelines?

The CARE guidelines (for CAse REports) were developed by an international group of experts to support an increase in the accuracy, transparency, and usefulness of case reports. View and download the CARE checklist here. The CARE guidelines have been endorsed by multiple medical journals and publishers and have been translated into multiple languages. Articles about the CARE guideline development process and a “manual” for writing case reports have been published in 2013 and 2017 in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. The CARE guidelines support the Equator Network’s mission to improve health research reporting. Online training to write case reports following the CARE guidelines is available from Scientific Writing in Health and Medicine (SWIHM), which also provides access to CARE-writer, an online application for writing case reports as preprints or for submission to a scientific journal.

Why case reports?

Accurate and transparent data collection from episodes of care informs the delivery of high-quality individualized healthcare. “Good case reporting demands a clear focus, to make explicit to the audience why a particular observation is important in the context of existing knowledge” (Vandenbroucke 2001). The CARE guidelines for case reports help authors reduce risk of bias, increase transparency, and provide early signals of what works, for which patients, and under which circumstances. Case reports following the CARE guidelines support the measurement of (1) clinician- and patient-assessed outcomes, (2) effectiveness of Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs), and (3) the return on investment (ROI). Healthcare stakeholder groups that benefit from case reports following the CARE guidelines include:

  1. Patients – reviewing and comparing therapeutic options.

  2. Clinicians – engaging in peer-to-peer communication at conferences or in their community.

  3. Researchers – developing testable hypotheses from clinical settings (e.g., Driggers 2016).

  4. Educators – systematic case reports from “real-world” clinical practice support case-based learning.

  5. Authors – the CARE guidelines provide tools to inform and simplify the process of writing accurate and transparent case reports.

  6. Medical Journals – the CARE guidelines support “Author Guidelines” and peer review. 

What is CARE-writer?

CARE-writer is an online application that helps authors follow the CARE guidelines as they organize, format and write systematic and transparent case reports and case report preprints. Case reports written with CARE-writer can be posted on preprint servers such as SSRN’s Health Science Case Reports Research Network or submitted to scientific journals.