Researchers from the Clinical Epidemiology and Health Services Research Group of the Sant Pau Research Institute -IIB, led by Laura Martínez, together with the updating working group of the Guideline International Network and other collaborators, have developed an “UpPriority” tool that provides a simple prioritisation strategy to determine which clinical questions included in a CPG need to be preferentially updated, as detailed by the authors in a recent article published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology.
Updating a clinical practice guideline (CPG) is a costly process in terms of time and resources, and to facilitate this process it is important to identify the priority issues that need to be updated.
The selection of the prioritisation criteria for developing UpPriority was based on a systematic review already published and its development followed a structured and explicit methodology involving numerous researchers, guideline methodology experts, developers and other users. “UpPriority aims to help organisations that develop guides to standardise the prioritisation process for updating them and thus improve the efficiency of resource use,” points out Andrea Juliana Sanabria, one of the first two authors of the work.
The new tool is easy to use and consists of six items:
1) Impact of outdated recommendations on safety.
2) Availability of relevant new evidence.
3) Relevance of the context of the clinical question.
4) Methodological applicability of the clinical question.
5) Interest of users
6) Impact on access to health care.
It includes a detailed user guide, which makes it easy to, among other things, rate each item, calculate and rank the questions, and summarize the results.
Some of the strengths of this tool, according to the authors, are that it uses the minimum number of criteria required, avoids the use of exhaustive evidence searches and is done in a format that is user-friendly. The tool includes a detailed guide for its application and the summary of the results obtained during the prioritisation process.
Reference: Sanabria AJ, Pardo-Hernández H, Ballesteros M, Canelo-Aybar C, McFarlane E, Niño de Guzman E, Penman K, Posso M, Roqué i Figuls M, Selva A, Vernooij RWM, Alonso-Coello P, Martínez García L; G-I-N Updating Guidelines Working Group and Collaborators. The UpPriority tool was developed to guide the prioritization of clinical guideline questions for updating. J Clin Epidemiol. 2020 Jun 19;126:80-92. doi: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2020.06.018. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 32565214.
