Dr. Atkins stated that the Preventive Services Task Force has gone through two iterations of the Guide to Clinical Preventive Services and released the last edition of the Guide in 1996. Now, the Guide will be completely revised. Controversial aspects have centered on recommendations to not do certain services that are widely used. The aim will be to produce updated reports that will be put online or published as journal articles and will be coordinated with the ongoing work of Put Prevention Into Practice. The first job of the Task Force will be to identify new topics or priority updates with input from experts and stakeholders.
Materials are now available over the Web.
CDC's Preventive Services Priorities Project looked at Task Force recommendations and ranked them based on preventive burden of disease and cost-effectiveness. To face the challenges of change, Dr. Simpson suggested that we have to contend with clinical judgment and knowledge. For translating evidence into practice, some things work for some of the people, some of the time. We have been taking knowledge to create tools for decisionmakers, whether they are guidelines, evidence reports, quality measures, consumer surveys, and instruments for measuring outcomes. In the future, Dr. Simpson emphasized, we will need more dissemination, evaluation, and implementation of this knowledge and these tools.