1/7/02
Practice Guidelines, pt. 1 : General Intro, Guidelines.gov

Physicians often wish to locate information to help make appropriate decisions in clinical care. Practice Guidelines are one valuable resource in this area. These guidelines contain recommendations by national organizations, meta-analyses of existing clinical studies or consensus by experts and generally are reliable resources of information. As with any medical information, guidelines may be subject to errors in methodology or the information may not be applicable to your particular patient. It always is good practice to evaluate information critically. The following article from the JAMA User’s Guides series gives useful information on how to use treatment information. http://jama.ama-assn.org/issues/v281n19/rpdf/jml80001.pdf

Two ways to locate practice guidelines are via the Internet and via Medline. Since Internet sites are more likely to provide the fulltext article in PDF format we will cover those resources first.
1) Guidelines.gov
http://www.guidelines.gov
This is the most comprehensive site for practice guidelines and provides fulltext journal articles as well as independent publications on health care topics. The database is searchable by keyword and by specialty area. You can also select more than one guideline on a topic and ask the site to compare the guidelines. Not all guideline publishers give permission for these materials to be reproduced on the Guidelines.gov site and there is some lag time before the guidelines are loaded here. If you know that a guideline is scheduled to be updated, it is a good idea to check Medline for a newer edition, or to go to some more specific sites, that we will discuss in our next email.

Web addresses were active and accurate at time of publication. These addresses are not maintained.