In 1997, the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) established an Ad Hoc Outcomes/Cost Effectiveness Advisory Panel to consider the development of specifications for compiling, indexing, and evaluating outcomes research/cost effectiveness literature on a disease specific basis. Such a resource could be used to support pharmaceutical therapy choice decision making by a variety of potential users. The USP has developed a protype health outcomes and pharmacoeconomic annotated registry of the literature on the disease state, congestive heart failure. Other organizations have established and are marketing pharmacoeconomic and health outcome literature registries, with two example being the HEED database (OHE-IFPMA Database Ltd) and the University of York NHS Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (DARE). OBJECTIVE: To share experiences on what are the needs of decision makers for outcome/pharmacoeconomic information and are they being met by currently available literature sources? Decision makers include health care practitioners, managed care organizations, third party payers, industry and governments. WORKSHOP FORMAT: The USP congestive heart failure protype literature registry will be described and compared to currently available pharmacoeconomic/outcome databases. Participants will share their assessment of the currently available abstracting service/databases and determine if there is a role for further developments. DESIRED OUTCOME: To determine if there is a need for a collaborative approach among interested parties to make relevant health outcome /pharmacoeconomic information more accessible to the drug therapy decision makers in a format that is "user friendly".