Gordon Guyatt Receives 2022 Einstein Foundation Individual Award for Contributions to Evidence-Based Medicine

The Einstein Foundation Berlin, a German foundation that funds cutting-edge research and collaboration in Berlin, recently announced Gordon Guyatt, MD, as the 2022 recipient of the Einstein Foundation Individual Award for his contributions to evidence-based medicine. The award includes a €200,000 prize.

Guyatt is a distinguished professor in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and has devoted his career to raising the standards of clinical evidence.  

As head of the internal medicine residency program at McMaster’s medical school in the 1980s, Guyatt pushed fellow doctors to base treatments on stronger evidence — particularly randomized clinical trials. In 1992, Guyatt and his colleagues detailed this then-novel approach, called “evidence-based medicine,” in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Evidence-based medicine is now standard practice.

Additionally, to help clinicians quickly evaluate new clinical evidence, Guyatt helped develop the GRADE approach (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation), a transparent framework for weighing scientific evidence and translating the tradeoffs of any given treatment for patients. 

Within the blood community, Guyatt lent his expertise to help develop AABB’s clinical practice guidelines on red blood cell transfusion thresholds and storage, published in 2016. AABB plans to highlight Guyatt’s contributions to transfusion medicine and AABB in an upcoming edition of AABB News.