National licensing for the Norwegian Electronic Health Library

The Norwegian Electronic Health Library (NEHL) is a national online library service for Norwegian health care personnel.Through the NEHL portal (www.helsebiblioteket.no), users have access to approximately 2,500 medical journals, bibliographic indexes, point-of-care reference tools and other medical information resources.The service is funded by the Norwegian government, and consequently must comply with laws and regulation concerning public acquisitions, which are more or less the same all over the European Union. Norwegian laws were recently changed in order to be more in harmony with the EU.The regulations state when public tenders should be used, and also describe in detail how a tender should be organized and what kind of process to use for different kinds of products and/or projects.

During the first half of 2009 a decision was made to acquire a point-of-care reference tool for Norwegian physicians. As a result of the tender process NEHL acquired national licences for BMJ Best Practice and UpToDate.