Guideline organizations' guidance documents paper 7: updating practice guidelines

Practice guidelines play a crucial role in patient care and policymaking, making it essential that they remain current and reflect the latest evidence. This study describes the processes used by guideline-producing organizations to update practice guidelines as described in their guidance documents.

We conducted a descriptive summary of guideline-producing organizations' publicly available guidance documents on guideline development addressing guideline updates (eg, guideline handbooks). We assessed eligibility and abstracted data independently and in duplicate. We synthesized data in textual and tabular formats.

Of 133 identified guideline-producing organizations with guidance documents on guideline development, 107 (80%) had guidance covering at least one aspect of the updating process. The most common trigger for updating was a change in evidence (75%), and most organizations revisited their previous search strategy for the updating process (65%). The updated guidelines were primarily published electronically (84%), with only a small proportion specifying methods for highlighting changes (12%) or notifying users (5%). A small proportion of organizations used a prespecified frequency for expiring guidelines (12%).

This research provides new insights into the updating process of practice guidelines and highlights the need for improved methods, particularly for communicating to users the occurrence of updates and any changes to the recommendations.