Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, July 14, 2005

US govt plan to translate medical research into lay terms

The US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is seeking bids to launch and maintain a service to translate medical research into terms intelligible to patients, consumers, politicians, and the lay public. The service will be called the Clinical Decisions and Communications Science Center. 'The purpose is to...facilitate access to evidence-based clinical and health care delivery information, and foster informed health care decisions by patients, providers, and policy makers.' For details, see the June 30 RFP. Bids are due by August 11, 2005.

Comment. I wonder whether this project is designed to build on the NIH public-access policy. That would make a lot of sense: First make the research available to everyone and then make it intelligible to everyone. Like the NIH, the AHRQ is a division of the Department of Health and Human Services.