THE COCHRANE COLLABORATION

Science magazine this week has an article on the Cochrane Collaboration. Started about a decade ago, and now involving 14 centers and perhaps 10,000 volunteers, the Cochrane Collaboration seeks to improve the knowledge base of medical practice. It has undertaken to draw clinical lessons from the literature of controlled medical studies. 50 panels have been working, and they expect to do about 10,000 reviews, to cover some one million studies that have been published in the last half-century. The job will not be completed for about another decade. (Then of course, it will be necessary to keep the reviews updated incorporating new literature as it is published.)

The experience to date suggests that the clinical reviews could be used to improve clinical practice considerably, but Science suggests that there are major difficulties getting the information to practicing physicians, and considerable resistance in the medical profession to changing practice on the basis of meta-studies of clinical research.

Still, the Cochrane Collaboration is perhaps the best example that I know of in organizing peer reviewed research results in the form of useful knowledge for application. Would that there were more efforts to organize knowledge for development patterned on the Collaboration.