Under the leadership of Alice Jacobs FACC, the ACCF/AHA Task Force on Practice Guidelines and ACC/AHA guidelines staff held a Methodology Summit in mid-December as part of AHA and ACC’s ongoing efforts to improve the guidelines methodology and rigorous development process. With the American Heart Association, our partner in these regards for almost three decades, we together also want to compare and contrast the current ACCF/AHA guidelines methodology with the standards proposed in the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) two recently published reports, Clinical Practice Guidelines We Can Trust, and Finding What Works in Health Care: Standards for Systematic Reviews.

Last August, the Task Force initially commissioned five Workgroups to consider what, if any, changes or improvements should be implemented to enhance our development process and evidence review and evaluation. Each Workgroup was charged with 1) reviewing the IOM Report recommendations and sections of the current tools available for developing/conducting systematic reviews relevant to their topic; 2) comparing and contrasting the recommendations with our current ACCF/AHA methodology, including an analysis/discussion of the gaps and barriers; and 3) drafting recommendations/considerations for changes and improvements to the evidence review process and the COR/LOE including a discussion of why we may or may not implement changes.

The invited members of each Workgroup (including all Task Force members), in addition to guests at the Summit, brought a diversity of experience and expertise to this initiative. Participants included methodologists, biostatisticians, clinical and research cardiologists, epidemiologists and nurses as well as leadership from both the ACC and AHA. An official report which will include the final proposals and recommendations developed during the Methodology Summit is being prepared. This report will be shared with the leadership of the ACCF/AHA and then published.

We are also thinking to increase the technological ability to search the huge volumes of clinical recommendations we have amassed to allow clinicians to be able to more effectively and instantly use this science and knowledge more effectively at the point of care. Dr. Rick Nishimura wowed the Task Force with a strategy and plan to create what I’d call a ‘virtual curator’ IT system that could re-structure the data in our future (and present) guideline data to make it available in new ways. It’s time!

If you are attending ACC.12 in Chicago, be sure to check out the session “What’s New in the ACCF/AHA Guidelines,” on Sunday, March 25, from 4:30 – 6:00 p.m. in McCormick Place North, N228. The session will discuss the recently published ACCF/AHA Clinical Practice Guidelines as well as an update on changes to the ACCF/AHA methodology.