Simultaneous development of guidelines and quality indicators -- how do guideline groups act? A worldwide survey.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the question of how official bodies, health care organisations, and professional associations deal with the absence of a methodological gold standard for the simultaneous development of clinical practice guidelines and quality indicators, what procedures they use and what they feel are major strengths and limitations of their methods.

Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted a web-based survey among 90 organisational members of the Guidelines International Network (G-I-N) representing 34 countries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania. All organisational G-I-N members were invited to participate in the survey by following a link provided in the invitation e-mail.

[The German Medical eLibrary].

The internet offers doctors plenty of high-value information for medical questions. However, several barriers impair the preoccupation with this information, most notably lack of time, far too much offered information and missing confidence in the reliability of the offers. The following article points out how the Agency for Quality in Medicine developed the Internet portal "German Medical eLibrary" (Arztbibliothek) in which information is transparently pre-selected and grouped in a structured way as well as easy to find with the help of a simple, user-friendly search function.