Director Minna Johansson of Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, Professor Gordon Guyatt of McMaster University and Professor Victor Montori of the Mayo Clinic jointly published a paper in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) entitled: Guidelines should consider clinicians' time needed to treat on January 3, 2023. 

     The authors point out that clinicians may need a lot of time to implement the recommendations proposed by the guidelines, and face huge opportunity costs when choosing the primary and secondary measures, which may result in the waste of medical resources. To this end, the authors propose a strategy: the guideline group should estimate the time needed to implement (TNT) the intervention when determining the direction and strength of recommendations.

     The concept, necessity and significance in clinical decision making of TNT are described in the article, and the authors recommend the following suggestions: The guideline group should spend a limited amount of time to estimate the time required for treatment. Researchers should develop measurements of time to treatment and refine relevant models and frameworks. Guidelines should periodically consider the time it takes to apply relatively low-benefit interventions to large segments of the population, and increase the net benefit to physicians for implementing recommendations.