Bridging the gap between research results and decision making in clinical practice: common problems in the development and use of a national Electronic Library of Health Care

Bert Aertgeerts, Karin Hannes, Frank Buntinx

Objective: One of the most common barriers to implement Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) in practice is the lack of a payable access to important sources of medical information. The Belgian branch of the Cochrane Collaboration aims at providing online access to relevant databases and full-text articles of several high quality information sources for all Belgian health care practitioners. A series of obstacles was experienced during the set-up of the project. These common problems were inventoried.
Method: A joint venture was established between the Belgian branch of the Cochrane Collaboration, International Visual Systems and the National Sickness and Invalidity Insurance Institute (government). This partnership will lead to an Electronic Library with a unique interface, which provides access to (1) a Research Search Engine, (2) a Practice Search Engine, (3) an online helpdesk. After a year of piloting, the Virtual Library is now ready to be used by health care providers.
Results: Efforts were made to develop a portal site based on an OVID-layout. The centralised database contains the most important evidence-based databases and the full-text of the core medical journals. More than 1500 health care practitioners from different disciplines use the library. Several disciplines have a specific entry, which provides access to relevant specialised journals and databases. Some of the more general problems in the development and the use of the Library will be presented to assist other researchers in the set-up of similar projects.
Conclusion: In order to bridge the gap between research results and decision making the building of a national Electronic Library of Health Care should be stimulated. Future attempts to optimise the Electronic Library should concentrate on convincing information providers to adapt their products to local information retrieval systems and providing information in the mother tongue of the users.

Ottawa 2004 O-091