" In Finland, guidelines have been used in primary care since the late 1980s to bridge the gap between research evidence and practice. From the very beginning, the electronic format has been the primary source for EBM Guidelines (EBMG). Although also published on CD and in print, the guidelines are currently mostly used via the Internet. Keeping more than 1000 guidelines up to date is a great challenge to the editorial group, and several methods are used to guarantee the quality. The Cochrane Library has become the most important source of information for the guideline producers and all Cochrane reviews relevant to GPs are summarized and linked to the guidelines. In this article we present our experience of producing the electronic guidelines for GPs, the methodology used, and data on the clinical use of these guidelines and their Cochrane links. We also discuss the barriers and facilitators to our process and present ideas for future development. "

" Physician's Desk Reference and Database is a Finnish collection of computerized primary care guidelines. The program has been in clinical use since 1989. For this study, a function producing a log file of all searches was added to the program. Two hundred twenty-seven users returned log files that contained 15,267 searches. The users made 3.12 (range 1-10.4) searches per day. The average time needed to find and read an article was 4.9 minutes. Sufficient facts were found in 71% of the searches. Dermatology was the most popular field of interest, followed by infectious diseases and cardiology. "