What is the Best Way to Produce Consensus and Buy in to Guidelines for Rectal Cancer?

Evidence-based guidelines are important tools and common pathways for translating evidence into clinical practice. It is most urgently needed when significant heterogeneity in practice exist. Actively engaging opinion leaders in the process of evidence-based guidelines development is important for several reasons. These include allowing the collective views of the practice communities to be represented, resolving heterogeneity in practice through discussion, and allowing credible recommendations to be formulated. Most importantly, the process itself is a tool for facilitating dissemination and implementation. Recognizing the gap between practice pattern and guideline recommendations, and devising strategies to address it represent an important step toward maximizing concordance between guideline and practice. Evidence-based recommendations serve as important reference points, against which we can measure, debate, and innovate from.