gms | German Medical Science

Evidence based guidelines are expected to be living tools that help inform evidence-based decision making, but how long do they actually live as valid documents? New evidence keeps emerging and may be enough to change the recommendations in a guideline. Therefore, an effective method is needed to incorporate new evidence and ensure guidelines remain relevant, current and evidence based. Having produced over 300 guidelines since 1995, our group developed an updating process that efficiently bridges the gap between existing guidelines and new eligible evidence. The updating process is in two phases: a rapid annual assessment of our guidelines and a full review of all the documents that are more than three years old since the original/updated publication. The rapid assessment is performed by clinical experts and a methodologist using a short questionnaire. Its purpose is to prioritizing the documents for full review. The full review is a systematic approach consisting of four distinct stages; initiation, literature search, evidence review and review approval and its outcome determines the status of the guideline and any further actions that needs to be taken. The entire process ensures that guidelines are retired when necessary and the validity of the active ones is preserved to help clinical users and policy makers make decisions based on the most current evidence This presentation will be focused on the resourceful systematic approach of updating our guidelines and how the decision to retire an existing guideline is made.