A guide to guidelines for pulmonary, sleep, and critical care medicine clinicians

Both the Institute of Medicine and the Guidelines International Network have recently published standards for trustworthy guidelines. The standards address multiple aspects of guideline development, including being transparent about funding and methodology, minimizing bias related to conflicts of interest, assembling writing committees with broad stakeholder representation, using rigorous and systematic methods to synthesize evidence and formulate recommendations, and periodically assessing guidelines for currency and updating them as required. In this article, we present the perspective of the Documents Development and Implementation Committee of the American Thoracic Society (ATS) on these and other guideline-related topics of relevance to ATS members. In addition, we summarize the many important take-home messages from a workshop that was jointly sponsored by the ATS and the European Respiratory Society, and attempt to place these messages in the context of a methodology that is rapidly evolving and a landscape in which clinical practice guidelines are subjected to ever-increasing scrutiny by clinicians, patients, and other third-party stakeholders.