The Horten-Center for Applied Research and Science

"Errare humanum est" was already a common saying among the Romans when it came to the issue of human fallibility. Deliberate skepticism regarding both our perceptions and our memory has always been an important premise in scientific work.

The newly opened Horten-Center invites precisely that type of skepticism. As an independent institute of the university of Zurich the Center is administrated by the university hospital. The moving spirit of the Center has been Prof. Dr. W. Vetter. Led by Prof. Dr. Johann Steurer, the Horten-Center is devoted to the critical evaluation of medical research and its applicability to practiced medicine.

This transfer of knowledge occurs in close cooperation with practicing physicians who select relevant information from large amounts of data. The condensed results thus obtained are then analyzed on the basis of the criteria established by Evidence Based Medicine and made available internationally to physicians via the new media internet and e-mail. Our homepage www.evimed.ch, which is visited by more and more people every day, now provides a continuously growing database on questions of basic medical care. This kind of medical quality control is a complete novelty in Switzerland.