Last week the NIH Heart, Lung and Blood Institute announced it was no longer going to produce guidelines, rather concentrate on evidentiary reviews and collaboration with external partners (http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/about/directorscorner/messages/2013-messages/june-2013/nhlbi-adopts-new-collaborative-partnership-model-for-clinical-practice-guidelines-development/index.html). In highlighting the recent IOM reports on Trustworthy Guidelines and Systematic Reviews this announcement clearly put the onus on professional medical societies to take the lead role in the sometimes contentious, always interesting balancing of ambiguous evidence and clinical need for clarity. Also related was the American Society of Hypertension taking over the hypertension guidelines (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/american-society-of-hypertension-assumes-charge-of-hypertension-guideline-development-212400321.html). Strange that this came from ASH not NHLBI and begs the question on the collaboration model - who chooses them? There's always a loss of control that the government faces when it releases information, which evidence syntheses are and what will happen. There will be those formal collaborations and there will be other guidelines developers who will also use the information to develop their own guidelines. At that point there will be no getting around the need for an independent arbitrator to assess guideline quality - maybe something AHRQNIH should be doing now
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