How Does ACP Develop Clinical Recommendations?
If you thought that the ACP Guidelines were produced "by a bunch of old guys sitting around a board room," you're not alone in this misperception. ACP Clinical Practice Guidelines, Guidance Statements, and Best Practice Advice papers are produced through a team effort involving the Clinical Policy staff, the committee known as the Clinical Guidelines Committee (CGC), and expert scientific collaborators. The mission of the CGC is to oversee the development of guidelines that will improve the practice of medicine. Ongoing goals of the committee are to improve the dissemination, implementation and evaluation of practice guidelines and to continue collaborating with other organizations on joint guidelines. For more information on the development of ACP's Clinical Practice Guidelines and Guidance Statements, please see our . For information about how the CGC disclosures interests and manages conflicts of interest, please see our . For more information on the development of ACP's Practice Points, please see our .
ACP Guidelines meet the Guidelines International Network (G-I-N) standards for development. For the sake of transparency, ACP completes a standards reporting form for each guideline it produces. These forms can be accessed below and are also published in G-I-N's International Guideline Library.
- Acute Pain Management (Guideline)
- Anemia in Patients with Heart Disease (Guideline)
- Antibody Response and Natural Immunity Following SARS-CoV-2 Infection (Practice Points)
- Chronic Kidney Disease (Guideline)
- CQ-HCQ for Treatment of COVID-19 (Practice Points)
- Depression (Guideline)
- Diabetes (Guideline)
- Diagnosis and Management of Diverticulitis (Guideline)
- Diagnostic Evaluation and Interventions to Prevent Recurrence After Diverticulitis (Guideline)
- Gout Diagnosis (Guideline)
- Gout Management (Guideline)
- High Flow Nasal Oxygen (Guideline)
- Hypertension (Guideline)
- Insomnia (Guideline)
- Low Back Pain (Guideline)
- Mask (N95, Surgical, and Cloth) Use to Prevent COVID-19? (Practice Points)
- Nephrolithiasis (Guideline)
- Obstructive Sleep Apnea Diagnosis (Guideline)
- Obstructive Sleep Apnea Management (Guideline)
- Osteoporosis (Guideline)
- Point of Care Ultrasonography (Guideline)
- Pressure Ulcers Prevention (Guideline)
- Pressure Ulcers Treatment(Guideline)
- Remdesivir For Treatment of COVID-19 (Practice Points)
- Screening Pelvic Examination (Guideline)
- Stable Ischemic Heart Disease Diagnosis (Guideline)
- Stable Ischemic Heart Disease Management (Guideline)
- Testosterone Treatment (Guideline)
- Urinary Incontinence (Guideline)
History of Guideline Development at ACP
ACP has been producing clinical practice guidelines since 1981. Guideline development started as a three-year grant called the Clinical Efficacy Assessment Project (CEAP). The goals were:
- To assemble and review the clinical literature on a specified topic;
- To identify the best scientific papers; and
- To analyze, reformulate, and present such information so that practitioners can readily determine the usefulness of diagnostic tests, procedures, or treatments.
The initial charge from CEAP was to evaluate medical advances. Early ACP guidelines addressed diagnostic tests and technologies. These guidelines focused on topics developed through surveys of the ACP membership and were chosen based on the interest of the internal medicine community. Because of CEAP's success, the program was given permanent status at ACP, and the project is carried out under the aegis of the CGC. Today, guidelines are developed by the CGC and the staff of the Clinical Policy Department at ACP.
More about the Clinical Guidelines Committee