The committee will conduct a study to recommend standards for developing clinical practice guidelines and recommendations. The standards should ensure that clinical practice guidelines are unbiased, scientifically valid, and trustworthy and also incorporate separate grading systems for characterizing quality of available evidence and strength of clinical recommendations. In this context, the committee should:

(1) Assess whether, if widely adopted, any existing set of standards would assure the development of unbiased, scientifically valid, and trustworthy clinical practice guidelines.

(2) Endorse an existing set of standards for developing clinical practice guidelines. If the committee judges current standards to be inadequate, it will develop a new set of standards.

(3) Determine best practices for promoting voluntary adoption of the standards.

Please see the companion study on Standards for Systematic Reviews of Clinical Effectiveness Research.