American Cancer Society Changes Its Screening Guideline Process

The American Cancer Society has revised the process it uses to create guidelines for cancer screening to make the guidelines more clear and consistent and to help people better understand how such decisions are made.

Many people in the general public and healthcare profession, as well as policy makers and insurance companies, use American Cancer Society screening guidelines to make important health decisions. Other organizations, however, also write cancer screening guidelines. Sometimes these different guidelines conflict, even when they’re based on the same information. So, the Institute of Medicine (IOM), a respected independent, nonprofit organization, established new standards for how guidelines should be developed. The goal was to increase the quality of guidelines and make them more trustworthy.

At the same time, the American Cancer Society evaluated its own process for creating cancer screening guidelines and decided to make its process consistent with the new IOM standards. A report on the new changes is published in the December 14, 2011 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Read the full news release at: http://tinyurl.com/c4sszg6

Source: The American Cancer Society