Some of the new clinical practice updates from the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) that have recently been proposed or developed were highlighted at the Digestive Disease Week (DDW) annual meeting.
In this MedPage Today video, Andrew Wang, MD, chair of the AGA Clinical Practice Updates Committee and director of interventional endoscopy at the University of Virginia Health System in Charlottesville, discusses the background of the committee and the process behind the updates.
Following is a transcript of his remarks:
The guidelines are important documents, and the AGA developed a clinical practice update committee to fill this important clinical gap. There are important questions that may be developments in endoscopy or inflammatory bowel disease or liver disease that do not have enough published evidence to support a guideline. And so the CPUs [clinical practice updates], we call them, fill this kind of temporary need as data are being generated.
We have two main manuscript types, the expert review and the commentaries. We usually have a diverse writing group of experts in the field who put together the best available evidence and also use expert opinion and input to inform clinical best practice advice. So, we use words such as “suggest” or “could” or “should,” but we try to avoid words like “recommend” because we’re not really advocating a clinical guideline-level of evidence, but really trying to fill the gap to help clinicians and those in the field take care of patients.
We publish anywhere from 15 to 20, 25 of these a year. And so we would love to get input from those of you who are watching this at DDW or at home. Please go to the AGA’s clinical guidance website, where you can find our clinical guidelines and CPUs. And there’s also an area where you can click and offer advice for future clinical practice updates and guidelines.
As part of our process, we solicit input from all parts of the AGA, including the governing board. We ask for input from the associate editors and editors-in-chief of Gastroenterology and CGH [Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology] and the other AGA journals. We also solicit input from the other chairs of committees in the AGA, and really we want to get as much input as possible.
Once we have a list of topics on either a 6- or 12-month basis, depending on how many we have floating at one time, we then rank order them and work with the journal editors to really pick what may be most impactful and timely at that given period of time in a topics kind of life course. And so it’s a really involved process. And I really think we do a great job and I’m very proud of our product.
Source: MedicalNewsToday.com
