Wiring a nation: putting knowledge into action

The Norwegian Electronic Health Library (NEHL) is a publicly funded electronic knowledge service, which was launched as part of the Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services in June, 2006. The library provides free access for health-care professionals to guidelines, systematic reviews, scientifi c journals, and a series of other full-text resources.

Everyone in Norway has access to major journals such as the Annals of Internal Medicine, British Medical Journal (BMJ), Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The Lancet, and New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), and to the Cochrane Library, BMJ Best Practice, and UpToDate.

In a scattered country with one public, but diverse healthcare system, the library integrates information sources in Norwegian and English with a bilingual search system, to provide a common knowledge resource. So far the library is mainly a passive repository, but the aim is to improve its interactive capabilities and to use it not only for knowledge transfer, but for integrated knowledge management.

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