Clearinghouse will help you follow guidelines
Scientifically based clinical practice guidelines hold the promise of reducing diagnostic and treatment variation and improving accountability. But the guideline effort has been foiled by its own success. Proliferation of guidelines creates an information overload.
That muddle will soon be unraveled by a new, Internet-based National Guideline Clearinghouse, a Web site with detailed information on thousands of guidelines, including comparisons of recommendations of different guidelines on similar topics.
The information will be equally accessible to physicians and their patients. With a few strokes on a keyboard, consumers can find out if their physician followed recommended practices in diagnosing and treating their illnesses. And physicians can assess the methods used to develop the guideline in the first place.
"Let’s say there are five guidelines on heart failure," says Jean Slutsky, PA, MSPH, clearinghouse project officer at the federal Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR) in Rockville, MD. "We’ll make available annotations so people can look across the guidelines and see what date they were developed, what the target population is.
AHCPR is developing the clearinghouse with the American Association of Health Plans in Washington, DC, and the American Medical Association in Chicago, IL. Unlike current publications by private publishers that catalog guidelines, the clearinghouse will be free of charge. The site is projected to be active by fall 1998.
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