When Choosing Wisely meets clinical practice guidelines

Abstract

The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Foundation launched the Choosing Wisely campaign in 2012 and until today convinced more than 50 US specialist societies to develop lists of interventions that may not improve people's health but are potentially harmful. We suggest combining these new efforts with the already existing efforts in clinical practice guideline development. Existing clinical practice guidelines facilitate a more participatory and evidence-based approach to the development of top 5 lists. In return, adding top 5 lists (for overuse and underuse) to existing clinical practice guidelines nicely addresses a neglected dimension to clinical practice guideline development, namely explicit information on which Do or Don't do recommendations are frequently disregarded in practice.

Keywords: Choosing Wisely; Leitlinien; Unterversorgung; overuse; practice guidelines; underuse; Überversorgung.