Living network meta-analysis and Rapid Recommendations for the treatment of COVID-19

Patients and clinician worldwide need trustworthy, rapidly updated guidelines to inform their treatment of patients with COVID-19. This project will produce such guidelines. Trustworthy guidelines need trustworthy evidence summaries. These summaries need to be up to date and need to differentiate will done studies producing valid results from poorly done studies that are likely to be misleading. Some of the studies of COVID-19 treatments will be trustworthy, and others will not. The evidence needs to be interpreted properly by considering all the relevant studies addressing each treatment, and their strengths and limitations. In addition, it will be important to revise evidence summaries frequently as new information is published. We will publish trustworthy summaries of the evidence that will be updated continually as new studies are published. We will search many databases to detect and include all relevant trials COVID-19. We will evaluate how well designed and conducted the studies were. We will also combine the results from all of the most trustworthy studies in a single analysis that will allow users to compare all options. These optimal evidence summaries will inform trustworthy practice guidelines. We will create trustworthy guidelines by constituting a panel that includes experts in COVID-19, experts in assessing evidence, front-line clinicians treating COVID-19, and patients who have lived experience of COVID-19. Panel members will be free of conflict of interest. These recommendations will be produced quickly and revised constantly as researchers publish new data. Finally, we will publish our summaries and recommendations in websites that will be freely available to all. The work will be conducted in collaboration with a leading medical journal, the British Medical Journal, and will be published there. The work will also be conducted in collaboration with the World Health Organization, that will use our guidelines directly or with minor changes.