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

Area of Science:

• Medical Informatics
• Clinical Practice Guidelines
• Evidence-Based Medicine

Background:

• Clinicians face numerous practice guidelines, often requiring complex evaluation tools.
• Existing tools for assessing guideline quality can be lengthy and difficult to implement.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a simple, user-friendly checklist for clinicians.
• To create the Guideline Trustworthiness, Relevance, and Utility Scoring Tool (G-TRUST) for identifying reliable and useful practice guidelines.

Main Methods:

• A modified Delphi process involving experts and guideline developers was employed.
• Multiple attribute utility analysis was used to assign weighted scores to checklist items.
• Four rounds of sampling refined the checklist and scoring system.

Main Results:

• Twenty-two evidence-based medicine experts, 17 guideline developers, and 1 consumer participated.
• An 8-item checklist was developed, with 3 items identified as major indicators of usefulness.
• A scoring system was created to categorize guidelines as useful, potentially not useful, or not useful, referencing the AGREE tool.

Conclusions:

• The 8-item G-TRUST checklist offers a potentially valuable tool for clinicians.
• Future research will assess the reliability of the G-TRUST tool in clinical practice.