Live Guidelines

What Live Guidelines Does

Live Guidelines transforms static, disparate clinical guidance documents into a dynamic, searchable knowledge base. It provides a single source of truth for UK clinical guidelines, ensuring healthcare professionals have immediate access to the most current, structured recommendations. The system is designed for clinicians, clinical coders, pharmacists, and other healthcare staff who require fast, reliable access to authoritative guidance during patient care, audit, or policy development.

This technology addresses the critical challenge of information fragmentation across multiple PDF documents, websites, and local systems. By creating a unified interface that surfaces individual recommendations with full citation context, Live Guidelines reduces cognitive load and saves valuable time that would otherwise be spent navigating complex document structures. The platform serves as an essential clinical decision-support tool that enhances both the efficiency and quality of evidence-based practice.

How It Works

The platform operates through a structured process of ingestion, processing, and delivery to ensure accuracy and usability.

Inputs

Live Guidelines ingests a wide range of source materials, including national guidelines from NICE, SIGN, and other specialist bodies, as well as local trust policies and protocols. These documents are sourced directly from official publishers to maintain authenticity.

The system supports multiple document formats including PDF, HTML, and structured data feeds from authoritative sources. Each source undergoes verification to confirm its official status and publication validity before being accepted into the processing pipeline. This rigorous input validation ensures that only verified, current clinical guidance enters the knowledge ecosystem.

Processing

Upon ingestion, the system performs deep indexing, breaking down lengthy documents into individual, actionable recommendations. Each recommendation is tagged with metadata, including its source, publication date, version, and strength of evidence. A sophisticated versioning system tracks updates, amendments, and retractions, ensuring the knowledge base reflects the latest clinical standards.

The processing engine employs natural language processing techniques to identify recommendation structures, strength indicators (such as "strong recommendation" or "conditional recommendation"), and clinical context. This enables the system to maintain the nuanced meaning of each recommendation while making it searchable and comparable across different guideline sources. The processing stage also establishes relationships between recommendations, creating a network of connected clinical knowledge.

Outputs

Users receive precise answers to clinical queries through an intuitive search interface. The system can generate automated alerts for guideline changes relevant to a user's interests and produce audit artefacts that demonstrate compliance with specific recommendations, complete with provenance trails.

Outputs are delivered through multiple channels including web interface, API integrations, and email notifications. The search functionality provides ranked results based on relevance to the query, with clear indicators of recommendation strength and recency. For enterprise users, the system can generate compliance reports showing guideline adherence patterns across departments or time periods.

Example Workflow

The following steps illustrate a typical user journey, demonstrating the efficiency gains from using Live Guidelines.

1. Before: A clinician needs to check the latest NICE guidance on managing type 2 diabetes. They search online, find a PDF, scroll through dozens of pages, and struggle to locate the specific recommendation on first-line pharmacotherapy, unsure if the PDF is the most recent version.
2. After with Live Guidelines: The clinician enters "type 2 diabetes first-line medication" into the CliniSearch bar. The top result is the precise NICE recommendation, clearly dated and linked to the full guideline. The clinician can see related recommendations from other guidelines (e.g., SIGN) and is confident the information is current.

This workflow transformation typically reduces information retrieval time from 5-15 minutes to under 30 seconds while increasing confidence in the accuracy and currency of the information retrieved. The system also provides context about similar or conflicting recommendations from other authoritative sources, enabling clinicians to make more informed decisions based on comprehensive evidence review.

Governance & Safety

Clinical safety and information governance are foundational to the Live Guidelines system.

Provenance

Every recommendation displayed is explicitly linked to its source document, including the publisher, publication date, and a direct link to the original source. This transparency allows users to verify the information independently.

The provenance model extends to showing the entire decision pathway, including any superseded recommendations and the rationale for updates. This historical context helps clinicians understand the evolution of clinical thinking on specific topics and provides additional confidence in current guidance.

Update Handling

The system automatically monitors for new publications and updates from guideline publishers. When a change is detected, the relevant recommendations are updated, and the version history is preserved. Users viewing older content are alerted to the availability of a newer version.

Update handling includes sophisticated change detection algorithms that identify not just full guideline updates but also partial amendments, corrections, and supplementary guidance. The system maintains a complete audit trail of all changes, allowing administrators to track the evolution of specific clinical recommendations over time.

Wording Controls

To prevent misinterpretation, the original wording of recommendations is preserved exactly. Any summarisation or highlighting is clearly indicated as such, maintaining the intent and nuance of the original guidance.

The system includes safeguards against accidental modification of recommendation text, with multiple validation checks ensuring that displayed content matches the source material. For recommendations that require interpretation or adaptation for local use, the system provides clear demarcation between verbatim guidance and any supplementary commentary.

Audit Trail

All user interactions, including searches and content views, are logged. This creates a comprehensive audit trail that can be used for clinical governance, demonstrating that decisions were informed by the latest evidence.

The audit system captures timestamped records of which guidelines were accessed, by whom, and in what clinical context. This supports clinical governance requirements for demonstrating evidence-based practice and can be integrated with trust-wide clinical audit systems to provide comprehensive compliance reporting.

Frequently Asked Questions

Implementation

How quickly can Live Guidelines be implemented? For individual clinicians, access is immediate via the web platform. For NHS trust-wide deployment, implementation typically involves a short technical integration period to establish a single sign-on (SSO) and can be completed within weeks.

What technical requirements are needed for trust implementation? The system requires minimal technical infrastructure, typically just SAML 2.0 compatibility for single sign-on integration. There are no requirements for local server installation or complex network configurations, making deployment straightforward for NHS IT teams.

Data Handling

How is user data handled? CliniSearch is hosted on secure, UK-based servers compliant with NHS Digital's Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPT). Search queries are anonymised for product improvement, and no patient-identifiable data is ever processed or stored by the system.

What compliance standards does the platform meet? The system complies with NHS Digital's Data Security and Protection Toolkit, ISO 27001 information security standards, and GDPR requirements. Regular penetration testing and security audits ensure ongoing compliance with evolving healthcare data protection standards.

Limitations

What are the limitations of Live Guidelines? The system is an information tool, not a clinical decision support system (CDSS) that integrates directly with patient records. It provides the evidence base but does not replace professional clinical judgement or local policy adherence. The scope is currently focused on UK national and specialist guidelines.

Does Live Guidelines cover international guidelines? The primary focus remains UK national and specialist guidelines from organisations like NICE, SIGN, Royal Colleges, and specialist societies. While some international guidelines may be included where they're widely referenced in UK practice, the system does not aim to comprehensively cover non-UK guidance.

How frequently is the content updated? The system monitors source publishers daily for updates, with new content typically available within 24 hours of publication. However, the exact timing depends on the publication schedule of the source organisations and the complexity of the guideline changes.

Core capabilities