On July 16, 2018, the National Guideline Clearinghouse at https://www.guideline.gov/ will no longer be accessible, due to federal funding cuts. In an attempt to prevent this wealth of medical knowledge from being lost, I have tried to backup as much of the raw data as possible before it is gone. It is my hope that I (or individuals with more knowledge of medical practice than I) can recreate the original search and cross-reference tools.
The bulk of NDC data appears in what are called summaries. I have
been unable to access the archive page listing all summaries due to
server timeouts (I am sure I am not the only archivist today), and
so I wrote a script that attempts to download every summary by
iterating through possible ids. I don't know what all the files
are for, but the information-dense guidelines of care seem to be
the files larger than 8kB, or those with a Guideline Title
(FieldID="161".)
The downloaded files are in an xml format that was provided for general use. I believe importing them into a new database will be a task relatively easily accomplished, especially with the help of http://archive.org/ to show how information was presented originally.
Syntheses are comparisons of more than one summary concerning similar topic areas. With no xml output, I have simply saved all in their original html. Hopefully they can be parsed for easier viewing and searching, and links to the summaries in question restored.
Some syntheses appear multiple times in different subdirectories of syntheses/, if they pertained to multiple topic areas. The files are identical.
These are expert commentaries on the guidelines. As with syntheses, I have only downloaded the original html, but hopefully they can be parsed for easier viewing and searching.