How to Keep Clinical Practice Guidelines "Fresh"

Clinical practice guidelines are guiding documents in medical practices. Timely updated recommendations are important and valuable to guide physicians in making clinical decisions. Guidelines should be developed on the latest research evidence for the best recommendations in clinical practice and updated regularly to remain valid. Based on the discussion about the status quo, methods and procedures, and challenges of updating guidelines, our results showed that the longest update period is 5 years, and the shortest period can be constantly updated. Since there are no standardized methods for guideline updating, we proposed in this article the procedures for Chinese guideline developers, and recommended RIGHT and CheckUp as the reporting checklists. In addition, the related strategies and suggestions to effectively update guidelines were proposed for the guideline managers, developers, researchers, and users.