St. Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein has fully integrated Wolters Kluwer's clinical decision support system UpToDate into the Epic Electronic Patient Record (EPD) system. This makes the hospital not only the first Dutch organisation, but also the first organisation in the entire Benelux to realise this HL7 integration.
UpToDate is a product of Wolters Kluwer Health and is used by 99% of the Dutch hospitals and by over 1.9 million doctors in 191 countries. The HL7 integration of UpToDate into EPD systems improves the quality of care, saves doctors time and ensures a more efficient clinical workflow. By consulting UpToDate, physicians can quickly find relevant answers to clinical questions.
Wilbert Jellema, Chief Medical Information Officer of St. Antonius said: "The integration of UpToDate into our EPD system is an important step forward that is good not only for the hospital, but also for the doctors and therefore our patients. Because UpToDate is now directly linked to our clinical workflow, doctors can click on a patient's diagnosis via the EPD. This diagnosis is then automatically opened in UpToDate. This saves the doctor valuable time and also improves the quality of care".
Application coordinator of St. Antonius, Yaran van Groningen, took care of the implementation of the system. "Combining the strengths of Wolters Kluwer, EPIC and the hospital has led to a solid and fast implementation of UpToDate in Epic.
St. Antonius Hospital has fully integrated UpToDate - which contains information on more than 11,800 clinical topics in 25 medical specialties - into the cloud-based Epic EPD system. This allows doctors to access information in UpToDate relating to a patient's condition, medication use and laboratory results, as well as all contextual information, anytime and anywhere. These sophisticated search results are visible within seconds.
Research shows that the quality of care improves when clinicians have easy access to the medical knowledge they need in their decision-making process. With clinical decision support systems such as UpToDate, clinicians have direct access to evidence-based recommendations in the areas of treatment, screening and diagnosis, drug dosage information, calculation modules that save time and prevent calculation errors, and much more. This helps reduce the number of medical errors, avoids unnecessary research and improves results.
HL7 (Health Level Seven) is a global standard for secure, electronic information exchange in healthcare. The HL7 standard defines all types of data in all care domains and care sectors.
