Earlier this year, funding cuts forced the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to shut down the National Guideline Clearinghouse. ECRI Institute, a nonprofit patient safety organization, has now launched the ECRI Guidelines Trust, a portal to expertly vetted, evidence-based guideline briefs and scorecards.
ECRI said the healthcare community would have free access to the website, which will grow over time as more trustworthy clinical guidelines become available.
The ECRI Guidelines Trust features new summaries of evidence-based guidelines from participating guideline developers, medical specialty societies, and other healthcare organizations. All Guideline Briefs include ECRI’s new TRUST Scorecard, which evaluates the rigor and transparency of a guideline to see how it stacks up against the Institute of Medicine standards for trustworthiness. ECRI evaluations are unbiased, fact-based, and free from industry influence.
“The ECRI Guidelines Trust is not simply the National Guideline Clearinghouse under a new name, ECRI stressed. “When the NGC website was shut down on July 17, its records became inaccessible. So, the ECRI staff who had worked on NGC had to start over,” said Karen M. Schoelles, M.D., director of the ECRI Guidelines Trust and ECRI Institute-Penn Medicine Evidence-based Practice Center, in a prepared statement. “It’s an incredible amount of work. That’s why we are launching with an initial set of Guideline Briefs and TRUST Scorecards, and will be adding new content continuously as it becomes available.”
The next phase of the ECRI Guidelines Trust, coming in 2019, will feature advanced search capabilities, an enhanced user interface, and support for guideline implementation and decision-making.
For information and to register for ECRI Guidelines Trust, visit www.ecri.org/guidelines or e-mail [email protected].
