Evidence to Guidelines

ABSTRACT

Evidence based practice deals with current best medical evidence in conjunction with clinical expertise and patient values to guide health care decisions. This paper intends to draw attention of the readers to the brief history of Evidence Based Medicine and the different methods of evidence appraisal in quantitative research like “hierarchy of evidence” which lists a range of study designs ranked in order of decreasing internal validity and may vary according to research question. There are other methods like integrative methods, network meta-analysis, quantitative modeling and infectious disease modeling that are also used for evidence appraisal. There are various approaches of quality assessment of research evidence amongst which GRADE approach (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation) is discussed in a nutshell to outline the roadmap from evidence generation in research to guideline formulation. Fundamentally the GRADE approach provides guidance for rating quality of evidence and grading strength of recommendations in order to aid in evidence based health care decisions.