What is a clinical practice guideline? A roadmap to their development. Special report from the Guidelines Task Force of the International League Against Epilepsy

Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) are statements that provide evidence-based recommendations aimed at optimizing patient care. However, many other documents are often published as “guidelines” when they are not; these documents, although also important in clinical practice, are usually not systematically produced following rigorous processes linking the evidence to the recommendations. Specifically, the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE) guideline development toolkit aims to ensure that high-quality CPGs are developed to fill knowledge gaps and optimize the management of epilepsy. In addition to adhering to key methodological processes, guideline developers need to consider that effective CPGs should lead to improvements in clinical processes of care and health care outcomes. This requires monitoring the effectiveness of epilepsy-related CPGs and interventions to remove the barriers to epilepsy CPG implementation. This article provides an overview of what distinguishes quality CPGs from other documents and discusses their benefits and limitations. We summarize the recently revised ILAE CPG development process and elaborate on the barriers and facilitators to guideline dissemination, implementation, and adaptation.