Trump administration deletes 20 years of critical online medical guidelines – “There is nothing else like it in the world”

By Jon Campbell
12 July 2018
(The Daily Beast) – The Trump Administration is planning to eliminate a vast trove of medical guidelines that for nearly 20 years has been a critical resource for doctors, researchers and others in the medical community.Maintained by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality [AHRQ], part of the Department of Health and Human Services, the database is known as the National Guideline Clearinghouse [NGC], and it’s scheduled to “go dark,” in the words of an official there, on 16 July 2018. [The site is gone. You can see it as it was before Trump’s antiscience forces deleted it at archive.org:  National Guideline Clearinghouse. –Des]Medical guidelines like those compiled by AHRQ aren’t something laypeople spend much time thinking about, but experts like Valerie King, a professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Director of Research at the Center for Evidence-based Policy at Oregon Health & Science University, said the NGC is perhaps the most important repository of evidence-based research available. “Guideline.gov was our go-to source, and there is nothing else like it in the world,” King said, referring to the URL at which the database is hosted, which the agency says receives about 200,000 visitors per month. “It is a singular resource,” King added. [more]

HHS Plans to Delete 20 Years of Critical Medical Guidelines Next Week