I recently wrote about the demise of the National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC). At the time it was fairly bad news as, by them aggregating the guidelines from multiple guideline publishers, it saves us considerable resource. However, every cloud has a silver lining! The NGC was not without challenges, for instance:
- It takes time to translate a guideline into one of their summaries – so it’s not as up to date as it could be.
- It seems to withdraw the summaries after 5 years. This, seemingly, arbitrary cut-off means they withdraw guidelines which the producer still has them listed on their sites.
So, what are we doing about it:
- We have gathered our own collection of guidelines from the USA. We have found nearly 3,000 guidelines, considerably more than the 1,342 guideline summaries have on their site (as I type this). These are not live yet as we’ll need to transition over, but that will happen soon.
- We have refreshed our other collections and identified around 15 guideline publishers from around the globe that we have previously not included.
- Put this all together and it will cement our place as the leading source of guidelines.
- As well as featuring them in the main Trip search we are currently planning a separate guideline site, watch this space.
A massive amount of hard work, but it should be worth it.
Trip Database Blog 
June 12, 2018 at 1:59 pm
Are the guidelines you’re selecting all based on systematic reviews like the National Guideline Clearinghouse, or are you including guidelines based on on other methodology like Delphi/consensus?
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June 12, 2018 at 2:11 pm
Hi Gini, I’m not sure I understand one of your points. Are you saying the NGC located the guidelines via systematic reviews or are you saying they only include guidelines that are based on SRs? I think you mean the latter and if you do I’m not sure that is how they do it (I know they tag some guidelines as being compliant with IoM standards).
That aside, the NGC lists all the publishers they use to gather guidelines. We used that list to go to the publishers website and grab the guidelines from there. So, instead of linking to the NGC summary we link to the actual guidelines on sites such as American Academy of Otolaryngology, American College of Radiology, Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma.
I hope that helps
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June 12, 2018 at 5:18 pm
Thanks for the reply. According to guideline.gov’s inclusion criteria (https://www.guideline.gov/help-and-about/summaries/inclusion-criteria), they request that submitters provide a clear statement that the guideline is based on a systematic review (& there is 1 caveat).
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June 12, 2018 at 5:48 pm
Thank you. I think what they mean is that you need to do a systematic review of the literature. So, not all statements are based on individual systematic reviews. So, one guideline topic might cover a very esoteric area and they find no evidence – so it’s filled with ‘expert opinion’. So, the guideline can have been carried out with a systematic review of the literature but that doesn’t mean that all the recommendations are good quality. However, as I type this I’m getting a nagging doubt – if the recommendation is on expert opinion can that be called a systematic review? In isolation I’d say not – but the literature has been reviewed systematically. Sorry, confusing myself here!
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June 13, 2018 at 3:54 pm
Expert opinion is often labeled Delphi or consensus in scientific literature. Guideline.gov didn’t accept those guidelines for posting. So back to my original question — will the Trip collection of guidelines include those that are Delphi/consensus or only those guidelines that are based on a systematic review of the literature?
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June 13, 2018 at 5:34 pm
Hi Gini, We do not have the resource to look through each guideline and explore the methodology. As such we have simply taken the list of publishers that NGC covered and grabbed all the guidelines at each of those sites. Best wishes, jon
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June 21, 2018 at 8:22 pm
Thank you! Appreciate the info. Best wishes to you with your project.
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July 2, 2018 at 6:41 pm
And thank you for asking Gini! It’s important to know that the guidelines in TRIP are not necessarily based on systematic reviews.
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July 2, 2018 at 6:49 pm
I’d love to support this ability, but Trip is very small and simply does not have the resource. If the community could help out I’m sure we could help create a system to indicate which are based on systematic reviews. But it needs organising…!
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