User-friendly guidelines: The missing link?

This article advocates the necessity for a user-friendly guideline structure to enhance and facilitate physician guideline adoption and use. A discussion of guideline development and history points to the reasons why a user-friendly practice guideline has not received the attention it deserves. The case is also made that guideline adoption, in general, faces many potential obstacles in the practice of the average physician. Therefore, to be adopted, any guideline has to maximize its physician appeal by being user-friendly, that is, easy to comprehend and use. To achieve this goal, this article proposes that the final writing of the guideline be turned over to professional writers who follow a programmatic guideline structure.