One authoritative view of live guidance.

What Live Guidelines Does

Live Guidelines provides a single, authoritative source for current clinical guidance by consolidating recommendations from NICE, specialty societies, and local policies into a unified structured view. The system maintains real-time accuracy through automated updates and version tracking, ensuring clinicians always access the most recent evidence-based recommendations.

This solution is designed for NHS clinicians, clinical governance teams, and healthcare organisations seeking to standardise care delivery while reducing the administrative burden of tracking multiple guidance sources. It serves as the definitive reference point for clinical decision support across primary care, secondary care, and integrated care systems.

The platform addresses the critical challenge of "guideline fragmentation" where clinicians must navigate multiple systems, websites, and document formats to access current recommendations. By providing a centralised repository with intelligent organisation, Live Guidelines reduces cognitive load and improves adherence to best practices.

For clinical governance teams, the system provides visibility into guideline usage patterns and compliance metrics, supporting quality improvement initiatives and audit requirements. The platform's structured approach to guidance management helps organisations maintain alignment with national standards while accommodating legitimate local adaptations.

How Live Guidelines Works

Inputs

The system ingests clinical guidelines from national bodies (NICE, SIGN, Royal Colleges), specialty society recommendations, and local trust policies through automated feeds and manual uploads. All source documents undergo validation checks to ensure completeness and proper formatting before processing.

Input sources are categorised by authority level (national, regional, local) and clinical domain to maintain organisational clarity. The system supports multiple document formats including PDF, Word documents, and structured data feeds through API integrations. Each source undergoes credential verification to ensure authenticity before being accepted into the processing pipeline.

Local policy documents receive additional validation to ensure they reference appropriate national guidance where applicable. The system maintains source metadata including publication dates, review schedules, and responsible organisations to support provenance tracking throughout the guideline lifecycle.

Processing

Live Guidelines uses natural language processing to extract individual recommendations, which are then indexed by clinical topic, condition, and intervention. The system maintains complete version history with timestamped changes, allowing for precise tracking of when specific recommendations were added, modified, or retired. Cross-references between related guidelines are automatically identified and linked.

The processing engine employs clinical terminology standards like SNOMED CT to normalise medical concepts across different guideline sources. This enables consistent categorisation and improves search accuracy. Recommendation strength classifications (strong/conditional) are preserved from source documents and displayed alongside each recommendation.

During processing, the system identifies potential conflicts between guidelines and flags these for clinical review. Relationship mapping creates connections between related recommendations across different guidelines, helping clinicians understand how various pieces of guidance interact in specific clinical scenarios.

Outputs

Clinicians receive context-aware answers to clinical queries with direct citations to source guidelines. The system generates alerts when relevant guidance updates affect a user's clinical interests and produces audit artefacts demonstrating compliance with current standards. All outputs include clear provenance information showing the origin and timeliness of each recommendation.

The interface presents recommendations in structured formats optimised for clinical decision-making, with clear indicators for recommendation strength, evidence quality, and applicability to specific patient populations. Export functionality allows recommendations to be incorporated directly into clinical documentation systems with proper attribution.

Dashboard views provide organisational insights into guideline coverage, update frequency, and usage patterns. Custom reporting features support clinical governance requirements by demonstrating adherence to specific standards and identifying areas where guidance may need review or reinforcement.

Example Workflow

Before Live Guidelines

1. Clinician identifies clinical question during patient consultation
2. Searches multiple websites (NICE, specialty societies, local intranet)
3. Downloads and scans multiple PDF documents
4. Compares conflicting recommendations manually
5. Attempts to determine which version is current
6. Documents decision with manual citation

This fragmented approach typically consumes 5-15 minutes per query and introduces significant risk of using outdated or conflicting guidance. Clinicians must maintain mental maps of which sources to check for different types of questions and often struggle to verify whether they've accessed the most recent version of each guideline.

The manual citation process is error-prone and time-consuming, with variations in how different clinicians document their sources. This inconsistency creates challenges during clinical audits and makes it difficult to demonstrate compliance with specific standards.

After Live Guidelines Implementation

1. Clinician enters clinical question into unified search
2. System returns structured recommendations with clear provenance
3. Cross-references to related guidelines displayed automatically
4. Version information and update dates visible for each recommendation
5. One-click citation generation for clinical documentation
6. Automatic alerts for future updates to relevant guidance

The unified interface reduces search time to under 60 seconds while providing greater confidence in the completeness and currency of results. The system's intelligent organisation surfaces relevant recommendations that clinicians might otherwise miss when searching individual sources.

Proactive update notifications ensure clinicians remain current with evolving guidance without manual tracking efforts. The standardised citation format improves documentation quality and supports more efficient clinical audits.

Governance & Safety

Provenance Tracking

Every recommendation displayed includes metadata showing the original source document, publication date, and any modifications applied during processing. This ensures complete traceability from clinical decision back to authoritative sources.

The system maintains hierarchical provenance relationships, showing how local policies derive from national guidance and documenting any adaptations made during local implementation. Source authority levels are clearly indicated to help clinicians understand the relative weight of different recommendations.

Provenance information is embedded in all exports and citations, creating an auditable trail from clinical decisions back to source guidance. This supports clinical governance requirements and helps demonstrate compliance during inspections or audits.

Update Handling

The system employs a structured review process for all guideline updates, with clinical validation steps before changes go live. Emergency updates can be fast-tracked while maintaining full audit trails. Users receive clear indicators when viewing guidance that has recently changed.

Update workflows include stakeholder notification processes for significant changes, allowing clinical teams to prepare for implementation of new recommendations. The system supports phased rollouts of updated guidance where appropriate, with clear version labelling during transition periods.

Update impact analysis identifies affected clinical pathways and automatically notifies relevant clinical teams. This proactive approach helps organisations manage change systematically rather than reacting to updates as they're discovered incidentally.

Wording Controls

Original recommendation wording is preserved unless clarity improvements are clinically validated. Any modifications are clearly marked and justified within the system. Local policy adaptations are distinctly labelled to avoid confusion with national guidance.

The system maintains version history for wording changes, allowing clinicians to see how recommendations have evolved over time. Wording consistency checks ensure that similar concepts are expressed consistently across different guidelines where appropriate.

Local adaptations undergo clinical governance review before implementation, with documentation of the rationale for any deviations from national guidance. This controlled approach maintains alignment with standards while accommodating legitimate local variations.

Audit Trail

Comprehensive logging tracks every access, search, and citation event. Audit reports demonstrate guideline usage patterns and compliance metrics for clinical governance requirements. The system maintains immutable records of all guideline versions and user interactions.

Audit trails support individual clinician reviews as well as organisational quality improvement initiatives. Usage analytics help identify patterns that may indicate training needs or system improvements.

The audit system generates compliance reports for specific clinical standards or guidelines, demonstrating adherence levels across teams or departments. These reports support revalidation requirements and clinical excellence frameworks.

Frequently Asked Questions

Implementation

How long does implementation typically take?
Standard NHS trust implementation takes 4-6 weeks, including integration with existing clinical systems, user training, and governance approval processes. Smaller practices can be operational within 2 weeks.

What technical requirements are needed?
Live Guidelines operates through web browsers and mobile apps, requiring only internet connectivity. Integration with EHR systems uses standard HL7 FHIR interfaces where available.

How is staff training handled during implementation?
We provide comprehensive training materials including video tutorials, quick reference guides, and live training sessions. Clinical champion programmes help spread adoption across organisations through peer support.

Can Live Guidelines integrate with our existing clinical systems?
Yes, the platform offers integration options with major EHR systems through standard interfaces. Integration capabilities include single sign-on, context-aware launching, and data exchange using FHIR standards.

Data Handling

How is patient data handled?
The system does not store or process patient identifiable data. Search queries are anonymised and aggregated for service improvement purposes only, in compliance with GDPR and NHS data security standards.

Where are guidelines stored and processed?
All processing occurs within UK-based data centres meeting NHS Digital standards. Data encryption applies both in transit and at rest, with regular penetration testing and security audits.

What data retention policies are in place?
Search query data is retained for 12 months for service improvement purposes. Guideline version history is maintained indefinitely to support clinical governance requirements. All data handling complies with NHS data security and protection toolkit requirements.

How is data backed up and recovered?
The system employs redundant storage with multiple backup copies across geographically separate data centres. Recovery point objectives ensure minimal data loss in the event of system failure.

Limitations

Does Live Guidelines cover all clinical specialties?
The system includes all major national guidelines and continues to expand specialty coverage. Some highly specialised or local protocols may require manual addition through the local policy upload feature.

How current is the guidance information?
National guidelines are typically available within 24 hours of publication. The system provides clear indicators when guidance is undergoing review or has been recently superseded.

Can the system handle complex clinical decision pathways?
Live Guidelines excels at presenting individual recommendations with provenance. For complex multi-step decision pathways, the system provides cross-references between related recommendations but may not replace specialised clinical decision support tools for complex algorithms.

How does the system handle international guidelines?
The platform focuses primarily on UK national and local guidance. While it can incorporate international guidelines through manual upload, the processing and validation workflows are optimised for UK clinical practice standards.

Core capabilities