Background: The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) summarizes over 100 systematic reviews per year for patients on the website Gesundheitsinformation.de (InformedHealthOnline.org). Objective: To develop an efficient method to judge whether the message in the research summary is still right. Methods: We have piloted the decision tool for updating Cochrane reviews (CRs) for the reference CRs of our summaries along with a search for other systematic reviews (SRs) and updated search of trials, if needed. We then judged whether an update is likely to change the message in the information or not. For the former group, we further evaluated whether we could judge the possible change of message with minimum workload of 1-2 working days or not. We contacted the review authors and enquired about their updating process to see whether our results are valid. Results: Until April 2009, we used the tool for updating 10 pieces of information. We could judge the possible change of message based on up-to-date SRs (two cases) or a combination of up-to-date SRs and updated search of trials (seven cases). In only one case, we were unable to show the possible impact on the message without updating the review itself. From the seven responses that we got from the reviewers, four of them are updating their reviews and their primary results agree with ours. We will further communicate with the Cochrane authors to evaluate the validity of our process. Conclusions: Up to now, we were able to use the decision tool to judge about the possible change of the message in most of our information with a minimum workload; our results agree with the results of the review authors.