Clinical Experts - Guideline Central

The significance behind their role when developing clinical practice guidelines!

In our previous article, we’ve talked about how clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) are developed by a panel of experts based on current evidence. But who are these clinical experts and why do they play an important role when a guideline is published or updated?

Developing recommendations within clinical practice guidelines typically requires expert’s input and clinical opinion along with statically validated evidence simply because;

• They have experience with the patients.

• They have an understanding of the underlying mechanism of the disease.

• They ideally have the knowledge about the current or unpublished research. They are ideally familiar with other experts in the field, high impact factors journals, and ongoing research.

• They determine the threshold for the “clinical significance” of the intervention, which is more important than the “statistical significance” represented by the p-value or confidence interval.

• They vote to reach a consensus on the outcomes, recommendations wording and strength, quality of evidence, and others.

• They word the recommendations so that they are easily understood by the healthcare providers and other stakeholders.

• They consider factors other than the “quality/certainty of the evidence” which allow the recommendations to be more implementable which we will dig further into in future articles.

Do you have specific questions about clinical practice guidelines? If so, feel free to email us your thoughts and questions, and stay tuned to more frequent posts on these topics and more.

Reference: Balshem H, Helfand M, Schünemann HJ, Oxman AD, Kunz R, Brozek J, Vist GE, Falck-Ytter Y, Meerpohl J, Norris S, Guyatt GH. GRADE guidelines: 3. Rating the quality of evidence. J Clin Epidemiol. 2011 Apr;64(4):401-6. doi: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2010.07.015. Epub 2011 Jan 5. PMID: 21208779.

Dr. Heba Hussein, PHD

Clinical Content Coordinator at Guideline Central

Member, Guidelines International Network (GIN), Research Volunteer, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and Assistant Professor, Faculty of Dentistry, Cairo University.