IDEAL framework
IDEAL (Idea, Development, Exploration, Assessment, Long-term study) is a framework for describing the stages of innovation in surgery and other interventional procedures. The purpose of IDEAL is to improve the quality of research in surgery by emphasizing appropriate methods, transparency of data and rigorous reporting of outcomes. To achieve this, the IDEAL framework provides a set of recommendations for improving the evidence base from research at each stage of innovation, as outlined in the seminal paper published in The Lancet in 2009. The recommendations emphasize evaluating new procedures prospectively, entering patients and studies into registries and databases to capture all incidences of a procedure, and reporting outcomes by established protocols. It is the first and only such framework for evidence-based practice that was established specifically for surgery and interventional procedures. Background The IDEAL framework was the result of an expert consensus developed from a series of meetings held at Balliol College, Oxford, from 2007 to 2009. This group was known as the Balliol Collaboration. The purpose of the meetings was to address the challenges unique to establishing the optimal evidence base in surgery, including practical, methodological, and ethical challenges. Attendees to the meeting (the “IDEAL collaboration”) included experts in evidence-based