Guideline Development Group

The guideline development group is the multi-stakeholder, cross-functional team assembled to develop the guideline. It often includes members from the target audience (specialist and primary care clinicians), content experts, patients and caregivers, front-line clinicians, evidence-based practice experts, outcomes and quality experts, usability experts, experts in medical and shared decision-making, methodology experts, and experts in health economics. (https://cebgrade.mcmaster.ca/guidelinechecklistonline.html#GuidelineGroupMembershiptable).

For the digital CPG, we will need to add a few more experts to the guideline development group or have a few key resources serve cross-functional roles with a Knowledge engineering team (see section on “Knowledge Engineering”). These may include experts in creating computable representations of the guideline such as: knowledge extraction and/or elicitation, terminologists and/or ontologists, clinical research informatics (ref), clinical informatics, clinical decision support, cognitive informatics, knowledge formalism and expression, measurement science and measure development, user experience (UX), and user-centered design. These experts often start with a “paper” or narrative guideline but will likely produce much higher fidelity, accurate, and usable expressions of the guideline through a more “agile” approach to concurrent, integrated, and cross-functional approach to guideline development and knowledge engineering.

Scoping

Scoping refers to the process and establishment of criteria to describe and constrain the focus of the guideline. It addresses who is the target user of the guideline, who it applies to, and what is addressed in the guideline. This is typically based on various factors, including high prevalence and burden of disease, avoidable mortality and morbidity, high cost, emerging diseases or emerging care options, variation in clinical practice, and rapidly changing evidence. The PICOTS Typology (i.e., population, intervention, comparison, outcome, timeframe) is often used in scoping and correlates closely to the eligibility criteria for the CPG (https://cebgrade.mcmaster.ca/guidelinechecklistonline.html#Prioritytable).