Journal of Clinical Epidemiology published article "Development and application of health outcome descriptors facilitated decision-making in the production of practice guidelines"

On 12 May 2021, the article "Development and application of health outcome descriptors facilitated decision-making in the production of practice guidelines" by Wojtek Wiercioch et al was published online on the official website of the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology.


Firstly, the authors explained Health outcome descriptors (HODs), which use a structured format to describe a health outcome. That description includes both the person experience of the outcome and the implications for managing the outcome. In this article, the authors described methods for developing HODs in the context of real-world experience when developing a clinical practice guideline. Meanwhile, the authors also described how the approach facilitated prioritizing and rating health outcomes and how it was incorporated in decision-making by guideline panels. Finally, the authors concluded that 1)HODs serve as a valuable tool to promote an explicit, common understanding of health outcomes during clinical guideline development and across different stakeholders; 2)HODs are helpful across multiple steps of guideline development to facilitate panels’ judgements, aiming to avoid variable implicit interpretations of health outcomes.

 

The link to the original article is https://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(21)00139-6/fulltext.