Most rural doctors in China are poorly trained and have difficulties in obtaining up-to-date medical information. With its GDP among the lowest five in China, Gansu province has particular challenges in educating its rural health workers. This three-year proposal will conduct a cluster randomized trials to evaluate the effectiveness of providing evidence-based clinical information through short message service (SMS) via cell phones to rural township doctors. It aims to test SMS’s effectiveness as a media for rural continuing medical education. Four thousand clinicians from 368 rural township hospitals in Gansu will be randomly selected and grouped into an intervention group and a control group, respectively. Three pieces of selected information appropriate for the rural practice from Clinical Evidence will be sent to the intervention group by SMS every week for 50 weeks, whereas the control group will receive the printed book of Clinical Evidence. At the end of the experiment, data will be collected and analyzed to compare the differences of knowledge transfer, clinical competency and patient satisfaction between the two groups. The researchers hope to publish the results in top medical journals.