Background: Busy clinicians should have easy access to evidence-based information during their clinical practice. Publishing groups and institutions designed specific tools to meet doctor’s need, the so called ‘point of care’ products. Clinicians may strongly rely on these information resources and it is therefore important to assess their relevance and validity. Objectives: To describe online evidence-based practice point of care summaries and evaluate their broadness, content development, and editorial policy against their claims as ‘evidence-based’. Data Sources: To identify evidence based practice summaries we searched MEDLINE, Google, librarian association websites and scientific information conferences’ proceedings from January to December 2008. Summary Selection: We included English web-based summaries specifically designed to deliver pre-digested, rapidly accessible, comprehensive, periodically up-dated, and evidence-based information to clinicians. Data Extraction: Two investigators independently extracted data on general characteristics and content presentation of summaries. We assessed and ranked point of care products according to: coverage of medical conditions, editorial quality, and evidence-based methodology. The correlation among quality and quantity factors was explored. Data Synthesis: We retrieved 30 eligible evidence-based practice summaries. Eighteen products met our inclusion criteria and were qualitatively described and 16 provided sufficient data for the quantitative evaluation. The median coverage volume was 80.6% (interquartile range: 68.9 to 84.2%). The median editorial and evidence-based methodology scores were 8.0 (interquartile range: 5.8 to 10.3) and 10.0 (interquartile range: 1.0 to 12.8) according to a 15-point scale. None of the correlations analysed
– editorial quality, evidence-based methodology and volume – turned out to be significantly associated. Conclusions: Doctors can now have access to many different points of care summaries to support their clinical practice at the point of care. Some are at the top rank in one or two desirable aspects but none completely satisfied our criteria.