In May 2022, Daniela D'angelo et al. from the National Center for Clinical Excellence, Healthcare Quality and Safety (Italy) published an article in the BMC Medical Research Methodology journal entitled "The International Guideline Evaluation Screening Tool (IGEST): development and validation." This article describes the development and validation process of the International Guideline Evaluation Screening Tool (IGEST), which is designed to screen for high-quality and trustworthy guidelines that can be adopted or adapted in other settings.

  The adoption or adaptation of high-quality and trustworthy guidelines can save time and resources while reducing unnecessary duplication and enhancing the applicability of guidelines, but specific tools to rapidly screen high-quality and trustworthy guidelines are lacking. Based on this, the IGEST Working Group developed IGEST through four processes: defining the scope of IGEST, forming and refining IGEST items, conducting pre-trial of IGEST, and evaluating the content validity of IGEST.

  IGEST is a generic tool for screening guidelines for any specialty, target population, and healthcare organization, but it is intended only as a screening tool, primarily for quickly assessing guideline quality and determining whether they can be adopted or adapted in other settings, and is not a substitute for some of the more complex guideline quality evaluation tools. Also, when using IGEST, the development team recommends that at least two investigators should independently evaluate guidelines.