AACE strives to develop evidence-based guidelines of the highest quality that provide unbiased, trustworthy, and up-to-date recommendations to guide best practice in clinical endocrinology.

The AACE Guidelines Development Workshop is a training program designed and delivered specifically for AACE by ECRI—a non-profit independent organization designated an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality [AHRQ] Evidence-based Practice Center with Penn Medicine. AACE is providing this complimentary workshop in two 2-hour modules for authors serving on AACE guideline task forces, AACE methodology fellows, and other AACE members by invitation. The primary objective of this workshop is to ensure that all members of AACE guideline task forces have the understanding and competency to successfully apply systematic, evidence-based methods to develop guidelines of the highest quality.

This workshop provides training in evidence-based clinical practice guideline development based on the GRADE (Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation) approach, recently adopted by AACE. AACE selected GRADE as a transparent and systematic format for developing clinical practice recommendations in its evidence-based guidelines. GRADE helps to eliminate inconsistency in rating the quality of evidence and grading of recommendations. Since GRADE is widely adopted, recommendations developed according to GRADE should be consistent with the recommendations of most other associations regarding assessment, grading, and therefore, guidance to healthcare teams related to the care of persons with endocrine diseases.

Key topics covered in this workshop:

• Scoping a guideline
• Developing PICO(TS) questions related to clinical practice
• Determining inclusion/exclusion criteria for evidence
• Assessing quality of individual studies
• Evaluating strength of overall body of evidence with consideration of outcomes, confidence, and factors such as harms and benefits, patient values and preferences, cost, and health disparities
• Synthesizing evidence for outcomes of focus to develop recommendations and determine language that is consistent with grades

Module 1: Introduction to GRADE

Learners are asked to review the following videos.     

• Session 1: Overview of Clinical Practice Guidelines including scope, developing key questions, and inclusion/exclusion criteria for systematic literature searches
• Session 2: Overview of GRADE

Module 2: Applying GRADE and Developing Recommendations

Learners are asked to download and review articles prior to watching videos. For the articles, learners should assess them for risk of bias as outlined in Module 1.

NOTE: articles should be accessed and downloaded prior to starting the video as they will open in the same viewing field as the video and cannot be opened in a separate tab or window. Files can be downloaded and viewed in a pdf reader or printed.

• Session 3: Review example studies and terminology and rate the quality of the evidence
• Session 4: Understand how to determine the strength and direction of a recommendation based on the evidence, review examples of recommendation statements and good practice statements