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 IDEAL framework was the result of an expert consensus developed from a series of meetings held at Balliol College, Oxford, from 2007 to 2009.
Attendees to the meeting (the “IDEAL collaboration”) included experts in evidence-based medicine, including Cochrane Collaboration founder Iain Chalmers, public health expert Muir Gray, statistician and founder of the Centre for Statistics in Medicine in Oxford Doug Altman, clinician-researchers, methodologists, and manufacturers of medical devices.