The Expert Consensus Practice Guideline Project

The authors present a new method of developing treatment guidelines based on an analysis of the responses of a large panel of experts. They first review the limitations of currently available guidelines and then describe the precursors of this new expert consensus method. The authors then describe the expert consensus method in detail, illustrating the discussion with examples from the expert consensus treatment guidelines for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. They describe how the survey questions are developed, the criteria used to select the experts to be polled, how the results are analyzed statistically and presented, and how to use the actual guidelines to help with clinical decision-making. The article ends with a discussion of the limitations and advantages of this newly developed method and gives information on how readers can obtain copies of the guidelines as they are published.