The crack team advising doctors on the COVID-19 front line in Australia
Doctors who want the latest evidence on what works in patients with COVID-19 can get help from a crack team drawing up the latest clinical guidelines.
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A crack task force is reading every new medical study on COVID-19 and immediately updating clinical guidelines for doctors on the frontline so Australian patients get the best care.
An avalanche of medical research is published every day on tests and treatments for COVID-19 and it’s so big, no individual medico can possibly get on top of it.
As a result, some frontline doctors in the US and other COVID-19 hot spots have been resorting to advice from their peers on social media for information on how to treat people.
Last week, experts warned in the British Medical Journal that current treatments were based on weak and overly-optimistic evidence from biased studies, and were therefore unreliable.
The Australian Living Evidence Consortium which is based at the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University usually spends its time updating clinical guidelines on heart disease, diabetes and other chronic illnesses now it is devoting its entire attention to COVID-19.
It has set up a war room called the National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce and this team of 100 experts from 20 clinical groups is working around the clock.
The researchers are using computerised machine learning to scour medical journals and research publications to assess whether hyped experimental tests and treatments work or not.
With fast turnaround they turn these into “living guidelines” of reliable, up-to-the minute recommendations to the clinicians treating COVID-19 patients.
“There has been a clear call for a single clinical source of truth,” said Professor Julian Elliott, who heads the project.
“Our role is to do the research, filter it and pull it together in a one-stop shop,” he said.
Normally clinical guidelines are updated every five years and under the consortium’s old model they were producing new living guidelines every month but now they are aiming for a weekly update on COVID-19 guidelines.
The media and foreign presidents have hyped various potential treatments for COVID-19 but the consortium says the evidence is not yet available to back any of the hype for any treatment.
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“For patients with COVID-19, only administer antiviral medications or other disease-modifying treatments in the context of clinical trials with appropriate ethical approval,” the consortium’s guidelines say.
“The data available on the drugs studied so far is very limited and we don’t truly understand if they have beneficial effects and there are potential side effects,” Professor Elliott said.
The good news was that because COVID-19 was a virus not a long term chronic illness the many trials now underway should produce results within weeks rather than years.
“There are world leading trials underway and there will be a flow from the completion of trials to medical practise within days,” he said.
To date most of the guidelines relate to how to identify patients with COVID-19 and how to provide ventilation.