Clinical practice guidelines to inform evidence-based clinical practice.

Background: With the volume of medical research currently published, any one practitioner cannot independently review the literature to determine best evidence-based medical care. Additionally, non-specialists usually do not have the experience to know best practice for all of the frequent clinical circumstances for which there is no good evidence. Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) help clinicians to address these problems because they are systematically created documents that summarize knowledge and provide guidance to assist in delivering high-quality medicine. They aim to improve health care by identifying evidence that supports the best clinical care and making clear which practices appear to be ineffective.

Methods: Non-structured literature review.

Results: CPGs combine evidence-based medicine (on topics for which evidence exists) with expert opinion (on topics for which there is no evidence). The optimal CPG applies structured and transparent judgments, from an unbiased and diverse panel which includes both clinical experts and non-physicians, to a systematic evidence review. It includes decisions in areas in which clinical data are both available and unavailable. The resulting guideline statements should be clearly linked to the quality of the available evidence and the target patient(s) should be clearly defined, so that the reader can assess strength and applicability of the statements to an individual patient.

Conclusions: The application of high-quality CPGs improves patient care, but all too often CPGs are not used to the greatest advantage because of inadequate dissemination and incorporation into practice. This article provides an overview of CPGs, focusing on their justification, creation, improvement, and use.