Objective: To describe a methodological approach to explore the concordance of recommendations across guidelines and its application to the case of the WHO recommendations on chest imaging for the diagnosis and management of COVID-19.
Study design and setting: We followed a methodological approach applied to a case study that included: defining the 'reference guideline' (i.e., the WHO guidance) and the 'reference recommendations'; searching for 'related guidelines' and identifying 'related recommendations'; constructing the PICO for the recommendations; assessing the matching of the PICO of each related recommendation to the PICO corresponding reference recommendation; and assessing the concordance between the PICO-matching recommendations.
Results: We identified a total of 89 related recommendations from 22 related guidelines. Out of the 89 related recommendations, 43 partly matched and 1 entirely matched one of the reference recommendations, and out of these, 8 were concordant with one of the reference recommendations. When considering the seven reference recommendations, they had a median of 12 related recommendations (range 3-17), a median of 7 PICO-matching recommendations (range 0-13), and a median of 1 concordant recommendation (range 0-4).
Conclusion: Following a detailed methodological approach, we were able to explore the concordance between our reference recommendations and related recommendations from other guidelines. A relatively low percentage of recommendations was concordant.
Copyright: © 2023 Yaacoub et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.