gms | German Medical Science

Background: Guideline financing is an important issue as CPG development is resource consuming, funding often is inadequate and financial conflicts of interest can arise constituting a risk of biased recommendations.

Objectives: The aim of this work was to investigate which kind of costs are associated in connection with guideline development, who are the most common guideline financiers worldwide and how much CPG development costs.

Methods: A literature search in PubMed was performed. We used the keywords `finance`, `pay` or `funding` combined with the keyword `guideline`. Our search strategy resulted in a total of 118 articles. Additionally, we analysed home pages of guideline organisations and their guideline manuals. Furthermore, we analysed our own costs for guideline development. Currently we are preparing an international survey of guideline financing.

Results: The lion´s shares of costs are labour costs. The literature search in Medline showed insufficient information regarding guideline financing. Some guideline organisations give no information regarding their financing neither on their home page nor in the manuals. Most guideline developers are at least partially funded by their national government. Costs are differing substantially, for example ca. 130.000 £ per guideline in Netherlands and ca. 1 Mill. £ for a SIGN guideline. Additionally, we will present our results from the survey.

Discussion: Costs and financing of CPG show a wide variety. Despite the major relevance of guideline financing, only insufficient information is published.

Implications for guideline developers/users: Disclosure and discussion of guideline financing is paramount to ensure quality and credibility of CPG.