Background Clinical guideline recommendations are developed to assist health professionals to make evidence-based decisions. This is reliant on having the most up-to-date evidence available. The current Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) standards require guidelines to be updated within five years. An online process which provides transparency and enables timely changes/updates, such as the wiki platform developed and used by the Cancer Council of Australia (CCA), would provide a more useful platform to update guidelines but is currently not considered within the NHMRC standards.

Objectives To evaluate if using the CCA wiki platform to update stroke guidelines would meet NHMRC standards.

Methods We reviewed a potential CCA wiki platform (“wiki”) model against the existing NHMRC standards (2011) to determine compatibility and identify where changes to the wiki model might be required.

Results The processes utilising the wiki were methodologically robust and were deemed to comply with 45/50 of the mandatory elements of the NHMRC standards with minor changes needed to comply with the other five elements. Difficulties arise predominantly due to the fact that the NHMRC standards are based on physically published guidelines.

Discussion A model of rapid guideline updates utilising a wiki platform is able to accommodate robust methodology and meets most of the current Australian standards.