DynaMed™ from EBSCO Health is collaborating with the Guidelines International Network (G-I-N) to promote the development and dissemination of evidence-based guidelines in order to improve the quality of healthcare. The evidence-based clinical decision support tool DynaMed aims to provide the most useful information to healthcare professionals at the point of care while G-I-N promotes the creation of high quality clinical practice guidelines that foster safe and effective patient care.
DynaMed is a valuable resource in the creation of guidelines. High-quality guideline development requires a lengthy process to identify, evaluate and summarise the current evidence to inform making recommendations. Development can take between 18-24 months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Although DynaMed does not focus directly on guideline development the systematic processes used to identify, evaluate and summarize evidence for point-of-care use greatly overlaps with the development needs for high-quality guidelines.
This overlap was first used to produce a high-quality guideline quickly with a limited budget in 2010 in Costa Rica. A breast cancer guideline commissioned by Seguro Social (La Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social-CCSS), Costa Rica’s public health system, was completed in six months, and this was achieved by using DynaMed which had already identified the relevant evidence and provided critical appraisal and clinically relevant summaries of the evidence.
Brian S. Alper MD, MSPH, FAAFP (Founder of DynaMed) was asked to present this development at a G-I-N conference in 2012, introducing DynaMed and EBSCO Health to G-I-N. Interest in documenting this methodology and facilitating this guideline development support quickly grew across guideline developers from multiple countries and G-I-N and EBSCO Health developed a collaborative agreement.
G-I-N comprises 100 organisations and 131 individual members representing 48 countries from all continents. G-I-N provides a network and partnerships for guideline organisations, implementers, end-users, researchers, students and other stakeholders.
DynaMed facilitates the dissemination of guidelines and includes listings of 14,000 guidelines, organised by topic, then by geographic region. It helps healthcare professionals to identify related guidelines and promotes better dissemination of guidelines by making them more accessible at the point of care. DynaMed also provides alerts when new evidence is introduced and that evidence may impact existing guidelines.
Each G-I-N member organisation will receive five complimentary subscriptions to DynaMed.
