Professional organisations face major hurdles in developing, disseminating, and updating systematic reviews and guidelines. The rapid recommendations project was established to drastically reduce the time it takes to synthesize and disseminate critical practice-changing evidence in order to reach healthcare providers and patients.
Rapid recommendations is a collaborative process including all key stakeholders -- healthcare providers, methodologists, and patients, in partnership with medical journals -- to rapidly produce evidence summaries, trustworthy clinical practice recommendations, and decision aids. Such collaborative networks can do this work far more efficiently, representing a potentially disruptive innovation necessary to provide users with recommendations based on the best current evidence. The target is to have synopses and decision support tools available within 90 days of publication of potentially practice-changing evidence.
Rapid recommendations are published as user-friendly synopses in medical journals, and online (open-access) on MAGICapp, to facilitate dissemination and shared decision-making at the point of care.
The BMJ Rapid Recommendations (RapidRecs) project is within the larger WikiRecs initiative. We have an exciting partnership with The BMJ, one of the world’s leading medical journals (figure 1). Four BMJ RapidRecs have been published, with several others being developed.
Figure 1: Video introduction to The BMJ Rapid Recommendations.
Figure 2: BMJ RapidRecs on transcatheter or surgical aortic valve replacement for patients with aortic stenosis.