Current Status of Clinical Practice Guidelines in Korea

The development process of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) must adhere to development standards and must be supported and steered by a representative and consistent governing body. We aimed to investigate the current status of the most recent CPGs published in Korea through surveys of medical professional societies and literature searches.

We collected CPGs developed in Korea in the past 5 years through several electronic database searches (MEDLINE, Embase, and KoreaMed), hand searches, and surveys of medical society memberships from the Korean Academy Medical Societies. Three authors selected Korean CPGs according to our inclusion/exclusion criteria and extracted data from selected CPGs about general characteristics, characteristics of CPGs for setup, evidence evaluation, and the finalization phase.

Out of 2,337 articles searched from various sources and 66 documents collected by survey, 129 guidelines (122 by database searching and 7 by survey) were selected. During the recent 5 years, the yearly numbers of CPGs developed were around 25. A single organization was the most frequent CPG development body (42, 32.6%). The most common development methodologies described in the CPGs included were de novo (53, 41.1%) followed by adaptation (48, 37.2%) and hybrid (4, 3.1%). Systematic literature searching was performed in most of the guidelines (79.8%). The evidence level was reported in 104 guidelines (80.6%). There were 77 guidelines (59.7%) that reported an update plan. Fifty guidelines were published in Korean (41.0%), and 46 guidelines were published in English only (37.7%).

Among CPGs developed in Korea in the last 5 years, the proportion adhering to CPG development standards has increased, but there is still room for improvement.