Criteri di valutazione delle banche dati bibliografiche elettroniche

Introduction: the need for valid and relevant information in clinical healthcare settings raises the problem of how to choose the best biomedical databases to subscribe to. Replicable standard criteria should be defined and should be easy to use and inexpensive. Health technology: electronic databases are useful tools to provide health professionals with good information regarding patients’ care, especially those resources that help support clinical decisions, and that are able to quickly identify documents pertinent to specific health problems. Material and method: the University Hospital “Santa Maria della Misericordia” di Udine has developed an evaluation tool to address the proliferation of proposals available on the market and evaluate potential costs and benefits of individual resources. This instrument is the result of the biomedical documentation service’s experience in the last several years. It consists of 23 questions about the quality of the information and technical-economic aspects of the database in question. The questionnaire’s answers are open or require a "yes" or "no". Results: the application of the instrument to a database results in an overview of the characteristics of each resource and the capacity to compare it with similar databases. Conclusion: the proposed evaluation method offers a quick, objective analysis of possible new purchases and also an indication to what tools are available to clinicians to find the desired information. This approach is part of the methodology of Health Technology Assessment (HTA) and draws attention to the strengths and weaknesses in bibliographic databases, especially in those that are used as clinical decision support system