All right, good afternoon. Welcome everyone to the Guidelines Symposium, Clinical Practice Guidelines, the Why, What, and How. My name is Atif Hussain. I am co-chairing this session with my colleague Emily Johnson. Emily is an associate professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University and I am at Duke University. So welcome and we appreciate your interest in joining us on this topic and learning more about guidelines and how they're made. The American Epilepsy Society in the last few years has redoubled its effort and focus on clinical practice guidelines. And I will be talking a little bit about that first. So these are my disclosures. None are relevant to guidelines presentations. I did want to take a moment and recognize one of the hardest working committees in the American Epilepsy Society and for those of you who have any interest in guidelines, when the call for committee assignments is introduced or announced, I would encourage you to consider the guidelines and assessment committee. It does a lot of work. It's hard work, but it's very rewarding and there's a lot of learning that happens on our committee. I do want to recognize Emily as the vice chair of the committee as well. Emily will be, well actually, you're now the chair of the committee. This slide is slightly outdated. Yesterday she became the chair of the committee. And I also want to recognize Dan Friedman who will be the vice chair of, or who is the vice chair of the committee. This list is the outgoing committee, many of these people will be continuing on, but the final list will be announced a little bit later. I also want to recognize Joy Keller who is sitting in the front and Shauna Strickland who may be here in a little bit. Both provide fantastic support to our committee and without them, our work would be impossible. What does the guidelines and assessment committee do? These are the three main things that we are involved with. First of all, we create the American Epilepsy Society clinical practice guidelines. That's our main function. We do that ourselves. And the second big thing we do is do it collaboratively with other societies. We have several guidelines in process right now. Some of them we're doing ourselves and others we are collaborating with the Neurosurgical Society or the American Clinical Neurophysiology Society or others. We also serve the function of endorsing other people's guidelines and affirming value of their guidelines. So when another society that's relevant or produces a guideline that's relevant to people with epilepsy, they will often come to us and we will affirm value of that guideline or endorse it, providing it with the American Epilepsy Society seal of approval. Now the committee itself doesn't do that, but the committee very carefully analyzes the guideline and then presents our recommendation to the board of directors who ultimately will decide to endorse or affirm value or not. Those are the things that we have traditionally been involved with. One of the things I did want to point out is that there is a lot of other things that come up in the Guidelines and Assessment Committee. We are really responsible at this point for clinical practice guidelines. These are at the pinnacle of clinical recommendations, but there's a lot of other documents that other societies will create and I want to differentiate those. And here's a list of only some of them. These include systematic reviews, narrative reviews, scoping reviews, consensus guidelines, and so on and so forth. None of these are clinical practice guidelines and that's one of the things we're gonna be highlighting throughout our presentations. That's not to say that these do not have value, they absolutely do. And as we move forward amongst our committee, the things that we are considering is is there a value to looking at beyond clinical practice guidelines for our committee and involving you, the AES membership, in terms of what would you like to learn more about? What would you like the American Epilepsy Society to have a position on? And based on what we hear from membership, we will be considering that down the road with the approval of the Board of Directors. But that's some of the things that the Guidelines and Assessment Committee is currently thinking about. Moving on to our presentation at hand, these are the topics we will be covering today. You see the list here, we'll be introducing speakers as they come up, but we will be talking about why guidelines are important, how they're created. We'll try to compare and contrast U.S. guidelines versus some of the international guidelines, how they're different, how they're the same. With the way healthcare is delivered, clinical practice guidelines have implications that are different in different countries, including economic value, which is not as strongly considered in the U.S. as it is elsewhere, and we're gonna be trying to highlight some of that. We're going to also talk about implementing or incorporating guidelines into clinical practice, which is really very critical. It's one thing to create guidelines, it's one thing to have them implemented into clinical practice. And then we'll have some time at the end for panel discussion, where I hope you will participate and ask, challenge, and recommend. And finally, Emily will wrap up, and without further ado, I'll just introduce you to the learning objectives. And these are our learning objectives for the entire session. Recognize the value and limitations of clinical practice guidelines. Summarize how they are created. Describe the differences from different countries. And finally, how to implement them in clinical practice.

clinical practice guidelines

epilepsy care

American Epilepsy Society

neurological associations

economic implications