NHS Evidence faults EMIS Mentor articles

NHS Evidence has made a draft decision not to recommend EMIS’s Mentor clinical research articles for accreditation.

The NHS body, which awards accreditation marks for high quality standards of health information, found that EMIS’s Clinical Immediate Reference Articles did not fully meet five of its 25 accreditation criteria.

NHS Evidence’s draft accreditation decision is published in a report which has been issued for public consultation until 22 June. Its independent advisory committee will meet again on 21 July to make a final decision.

EMIS said it was surprised by the decision and said that it expected to meet the outstanding criteria which it said related to procedural issues rather than the quality of the content.

The draft accreditation report said the advisory committee found that EMIS’s clinical immediate reference articles, produced to provide up-to-date information to primary care staff via the Mentor decision support tool and Patient Plus articles on Patient UK, failed to meet two of the accreditation criteria and found three uncertain.

The committee said the main reason for the recommendation not to accredit the article was the performance of the article against its ‘rigour of development’ criteria.

The advisory committee said areas that did not meet the required standard and where improvement was needed including ensuring the process document specified the methods for including or excluding recommendations and stated how the strengths and weaknesses of evidence were evaluated.

NHS Evidence also said EMIS needed systems to check and state explicitly whether patient opinion, organisational as well as financial barriers had been considered by the main guidance producer. EMIS should also ensure that patients are involved in its process for producing new or updated articles.

Gordon Brooks, Head of EMIS Knowledge-Based Systems, said the company was very surprised at the draft decision as 20 out of the 25 criteria had been met in full but that accreditation was an ongoing process.

He added: “NHS Evidence has invited us to make further submissions and we are now working to address the outstanding criteria, which do not relate to the quality of the content but to some very specific procedural issues. We expect to more than meet the outstanding criteria."