Clinical Guidelines for Care of the Emergency Patient a project of the Division of Emergency Medicine Informatics at the Boston University Department of Emergency Medicine

Background: Clinical guidelines are powerful tools to aid clinicians in day to day practice. However, their dissemination and adoption have been poor. Countless clinical guidelines have been published on the internet, but they are difficult to find, and only a subset pertain to EM.

Objective: to perform a comprehensive survey of clinical guidelines available on the internet, and to create a database-backed, web-based resource to index and make available clinical guidelines relevant to EM.

Methods: We performed a comprehensive search for clinical guidelines on the internet using an automated web search tool (Copernic 99, Agents Technologies Inc., Quebec, Canada) using the search terms “clinical guidelines” and limiting the results to the 1000 best matches. After selecting clinical guidelines relevant to EM, we created a database (ACCESS 97, Microsoft, Inc. Redmond WA) to catalog these guidelines by subject (MeSH), EM core curriculum heading, author, and sponsoring organization. We then created a HTML based user interface to link this database via our departments web-server to the world-wide-web.

Results: Of 1000 web-sites offering clinical guidelines, the above were chosen for this pilot study for their applicability to EM. The database provides a uniform framework for cataloging and maintaining pointers to web-based clinical guidelines, allowing users to browse guidelines by subject, EM core curriculum headings, author, year, and sponsoring organization. The web site also provides automated links to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database, for searching practice guidelines published in the medical literature.

Conclusions: Web-based clinical guidelines represent a heterogeneous and poorly accessible resource for EM. Our web site provides an easy to use resource, making clinical guidelines readily available to emergency clinicians.