Grant: Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

Clinical practice guidelines have the potential to bring clinical information into practice, but this has not been done consistently. Currently, there are tools that can assess the quality of guidelines, inform guideline developers about problems with how to apply guidelines, or to adapt guidelines to other settings. Although these tools can contribute to successful use of guidelines, most are not easy to use and do not consider how to encourage communication between physicians who develop guidelines and those who use them. We conducted focus groups with physicians to find out what they think are optimal characteristics of guidelines, and what items should be included in a guideline implementability tool (GUIDE-IT). We used this information to build a prototype. The purpose of this 2-year research project is to ensure that the GUIDE-IT prototype can be easily used by both guideline developers and end-users (i.e., family physicians), and to test if the prototype can improve family physicians' clinical decision making and guideline use. The research project will be done in 2 phases: The purpose of Phase 1 will be to make sure that the prototype is easy to use, to determine which guideline attributes are possible to change during the guideline development process, and which attributes have the best potential for improving recommendations. In Phase 2, GUIDE-IT will be tested in a controlled study to determine if it can simplify guideline recommendations, and if it has the potential to improve the use of guidelines in family practice. This will be done using a web-based system where physicians will use patient cases to assess how changes to guideline recommendations (using the GUIDE-IT prototype) affect their clinical decisions in practice.