Director, Clinical Guidance Methodology

Lead the development, implementation, and oversight of evidence review and analysis processes required for all ACOG clinical guidance. Serve as the primary methodological expert for clinical guideline development, ensuring all documents follow evidence‑based processes and accurately reflect the best available science. Supervise and mentor research staff and medical librarians who support evidence analysis and synthesis.

Note: This position is considered Hybrid and will need to commute to ACOG's office located in Washington, D.C.

Supervisory Responsibilities:

• This position does have direct supervisory responsibilities, which may include serving as a coach and mentor for those they supervise.

 Duties/Responsibilities:

Clinical Guidance Methodology Leadership:

• Direct the design, evaluation, and continuous improvement of complex processes and methodology (including relevant software tools and AI solutions) for clinical guidance development.
• Serve as ACOG’s methodological expert, training authors, committees, and staff and serving as an advisor throughout guideline development.

Quality Assurance and Process Improvement:

• Establish and maintain quality‑assurance mechanisms for evidence analysis and guideline development.
• Lead the development, testing, and refinement of new processes, ensuring standardized templates, documentation, and training across all clinical guidance programs.
• Lead the exploration and testing of AI-support tools, including partnering with teams to pilot implementation.

Evidence Review:

• Advise on scoping and outline development, including drafting structured clinical questions (PICO), translating evidence into recommendations, and addressing stakeholder comments.
• Provide direction on search strategies and ensure appropriate inclusion/exclusion criteria are applied.
• Oversee analysis and refinement of literature search results and supervise the creation of evidence tables, maps, and summaries.
• Guide authors and committees in using evidence‑review platforms and applying evaluation criteria consistently.
• Ensure recommendations accurately reflect the highest‑quality evidence and that final manuscripts are methodologically sound.

Committee and Program Support:

• Respond to stakeholder inquiries and summarize evidence to support effective participation in methodologic and clinical discussions.
• Serve as lead staff liaison with external systematic review developers (eg, PCORI) for systematic reviews, including topic nomination, key‑question refinement, review integration, and expert panel coordination.
• Coordinate research support needs across the four clinical committees, including routine reviews, scoping searches, and new or bridge literature searches.
• Support Research Managers in developing evidence maps and evidence tables for clinical guidance documents.

Training and Capacity Building:

• Supervise, train, and direct clinical guidance research staff in implementation of evidence review and analysis methodology and processes.
• Ensure training programs are in place for authors, committee members, and staff, particularly on complex methodology.
• Develop training materials and lead education sessions on new processes and tools.

Required Skills/Abilities:

• Experience with evidence-based clinical guideline development and methodology, including the use of risk-of-bias assessment tools (eg, RoB 2, ROBINS-1, AGREE-II, AMSTAR) and GRADE guideline development framework, is required.
• Knowledge of research methodology, tenets of evidence-based medicine, statistics, and medical terminology is required.
• Knowledge of medical databases such as PubMed, systematic review software such as Covidence, and reference-organizing software such as RefWorks and EndNote is required.
• Familiarity with AI applications in literature review and evidence synthesis is preferred.
• Knowledge about current issues related to women’s health is helpful.
• Ability to work independently, adhere to timetables and prioritize, organize, and coordinate multiple tasks simultaneously.
• Ability to interact with a variety of levels of professional personnel. Excellent verbal and written communications skills required.

Education and Experience:

• Master’s degree with a focus in epidemiology, public health, or the health sciences is required.
• Minimum of 8–10 years of relevant experience in research and/or clinical guideline development and medical information retrieval, analysis, and interpretation.