Background: Cochrane Belgium disseminates results of Cochrane reviews to Belgian healthcare professionals and patients in their native languages; for example, Cochrane Corners translated summaries of Cochrane reviews. They were originally published in professional journals, but also disseminated via ebpracticenet, which is a website with trustworthy information for healthcare professionals. Moreover, we spearhead the Cochrane Wikipedia-project in Dutch. Our goal is to always provide the right evidence at the right time in the right format. The question remains, however, what needs to be done with evidence dissemination products on websites as reviews get updated.
Objectives: To assess how many of the reviews used in Cochrane Corners have been updated since we disseminated them via ebpracticenet.be. To draft a procedure to ensure Belgian evidence dissemination products are kept up to date.
Methods: We assessed how many Cochrane reviews were updated since the Cochrane Corner was disseminated. We distinguished 3 types of updates: 1. updated search but no new studies found, 2. updated search and new studies included but with the same conclusion, 3. updates with a change of conclusion.
Results: We disseminated 108 Cochrane Corners via ebpracticenet. The source reviews from 25 Corners were updated since they were published. Six updates concerned an updated search only; 12 resulted in the identification of new studies but without changing the conclusions, but 7 updates resulted in a different conclusion. We are currently developing ideas and procedures to update our evidence dissemination products in a timely fashion. This might include taking down some products, adding new evidence in banners to existing products, or developing entirely new products. Additionally, we aim to make even more review evidence available, but this also increases the amount of information that will enter into the update cycle.
Conclusions: Ensuring evidence dissemination products are relevant and up to date is of crucial importance to both healthcare professionals as well as patients. Therefore, such products based on Cochrane reviews with a changed conclusion need to be amended as soon as possible. An efficient and easy-to-use system to check for updated reviews should be made available to those disseminating them in languages other than English.