Delivering the best care everywhere
The anniversary also marks a major milestone in its partnership with the Ariadne Labs Better Evidence program: over 100,000 subscriptions of UpToDate have been donated to caregivers and institutions in resource-limited settings in 159 countries. The program, which began in 2009, is part of Wolters Kluwer’s ongoing mission to deliver the best care everywhere.
“UpToDate subscriptions have supported clinicians working in some of the most challenging settings around the globe, allowing them to provide better, more equitable care for their patients, regardless of location or resources,” said Rebecca Weintraub, MD, Director of Better Evidence at Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Giving medical students access to UpToDate in low-resource settings, where cost has traditionally been a major barrier, is helping prepare them to provide evidence-based care for long into the future.”
Three decades of better, more consistent care decisions
UpToDate was founded in 1992 by renowned nephrologist Burton “Bud” Rose, MD to solve the challenge of how to help clinicians stay current and make better decisions for their patients. He started with his specialty of nephrology. UpToDate first shipped on floppy disks by mail; a new version was released three times a year.
Three decades later, UpToDate is used on smartphones, browsers, and within electronic health record (EHR) systems by over two million clinicians and 44,000 institutions across more than 190 countries. It is updated continuously and used heavily with users accessing over 54 million topics per month across 25 specialties.
The power of UpToDate was displayed during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic – with a rapidly changing knowledgebase, it was imperative that clinicians had the most recent, vetted, and trusted information to treat patients. UpToDate quickly expanded its resources, providing free access to the Wolters Kluwer Coronavirus Resource Center, featuring over 90 different topics that have been updated 2,000 times.
UpToDate has fulfilled Dr. Rose’s ambition to improve care and has been recognized as the standard and leader in the CDS market for pioneering evidence-based, point-of-care solutions that help clinicians align care team decisions.
