In Europe, North America and elsewhere, growing interest has focussed on evidence-based healthcare systems, incorporating the deployment of practice guidelines, as a field of application for health telematics. The clinical benefit and technical feasibility of common European approaches to this task has recently been demonstrated. In Europe it is likely that, building on recent progress in electronic health record architecture (EHRA) standards, a sufficient state of maturity can be reached to justify initiation within CEN TC251 of a pre-standards process on guideline content formats during the current 5^th Framework of EC RT&D activity. There is now a similar impetus to agree standards for this field in North America. Thanks to fruitful EC-USA contacts during the 4^th Framework programme, there is now a chance, given well-planned coordination, to establish a global consensus optimally suited to serve the world-wide delivery and application of evidence-based medicine. This review notes three factors which may accelerate progress to convergence:

(1) revolutionary changes in the knowledge basis of professional/patient/public healthcare partnerships, involving the key role of the Web as a health knowledge resource for citizens, and a rapidly growing market for personalised health information and advice;

(2) the emergence at national levels of digital warehouses of clinical guidelines and EBM knowledge resources, agencies which are capable of brokering common mark-up and interchange media definitions between knowledge providers, industry and healthcare organizations;

(3) the closing gap in knowledge management technology, with the advent of XML and RDF, between approaches and services based respectively on text mark-up and knowledge-base paradigms.

A current project in the UK National Health Service (the National electronic Library of Health) is cited as an example of a national initiative designed to harness these trends.