Developing a Clinician Friendly Tool to Identify Useful Clinical Practice Guidelines: G-TRUST

The Article in Brief

Developing a Clinician Friendly Tool to Identify Useful Clinical Practice Guidelines: G-TRUST

Allen F. Shaughnessy , and colleagues

Background Although clinical practice guidelines should be based on high quality research and practice experience, they vary in their relevance to practice, use of evidence, and other factors. This report describes the development of the Guideline Trustworthiness, Relevance, and Utility Scoring Tool (G-TRUST), a tool for clinicians to identify useful practice guidelines.

What This Study Found The 8-item G-TRUST is potentially helpful in identifying useful clinical practice guidelines.Twenty-two experts in evidence-based medicine, 17 developers of high-quality guidelines, and one consumer representative participated in a process to obtain consensus on a checklist of items and their relative impact on guideline quality. More than 75 percent of experts found three of the eight checklist items to be major indicators of guideline usefulness and, in comparison to a reference standard (the AGREE tool), a scoring system was developed identifying guidelines as "useful," "may not be useful," and "not useful." The checklist identified 92 percent of low-quality guidelines and disqualified many high quality guidelines because of a stricter definition of trustworthiness, including more stringent conflict of interest requirements.

Implications

• With the proliferation of practice guidelines, numbering in the thousands, the authors call for research to determine the reliability of G-TRUST and to examine how the tool might interact with technology, such as smart phone applications