Wolters Kluwer, Health announced today the launch of UpToDate® Advanced™, a guided clinical decision-making solution with dynamic and interactive algorithms as well as lab monographs designed to reduce unwarranted variations in care. Facing shrinking reimbursements and over $540 billion in avoidable costs¹ in the U.S. alone, healthcare organizations are turning to trusted evidence and tools that standardize clinical decisions across populations while reducing costs.
Clinical pathways aimed at helping caregivers deliver consistent, high-quality, and effective care can be difficult to develop and maintain. In addition, their adoption can pose a considerable challenge. UpToDate Advanced equips providers with continuously updated decision pathways that optimize decisions at the point of care by providing recommendations tailored for specific patients helping to achieve effective care.
“As an organization, reducing variations in the care we provide is essential to our efforts to improve patient safety, clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction,” commented Keith Griffin, MD, CMIO for Novant Medical Group, a network of approximately 2,500 physicians representing a spectrum of primary and specialty care. “Today, we contend with conditions with increasingly complicated patient management options, such as diabetes and atrial fibrillation. UpToDate Advanced guides our physicians to the most appropriate clinical decisions for each patient.”
With UpToDate Advanced, physicians can streamline care at different points using UpToDate Pathways for interactive decision-making workflows and Lab Interpretation for evaluating abnormal test results and deciding next steps, which can be a major source of variations in care.
“Clinical care variation is widespread, expensive, and it compromises the quality of care. By addressing care variation, healthcare organizations have the opportunity to improve health outcomes at lower costs,” said Peter Bonis, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Clinical Effectiveness, Wolters Kluwer. “With UpToDate Advanced, providers now have additional resources that can help curtail unwanted care variability with a patient-centered workflow that assists caregivers to optimize their decisions.”
UpToDate Pathways are interactive decision-making tools that help clinicians arrive at the best decisions for their patients in view of contemporary evidence, clinical experience and patient-specific factors. They are built upon the evidence and graded recommendations found in UpToDate, the acclaimed clinical decision support resource associated with improved outcomes. More than 11,000 clinical topics, medical calculators and graphics from UpToDate were used to develop pathways.
UpToDate Pathways target common medical conditions with well-established variability that can be avoided with the support of evidence-based clinical decision-making. These conditions tie to national and international quality measures and the most-searched UpToDate topics among the more than half a billion topics viewed annually by 1.5 million physicians around the world.
With Lab Interpretation, healthcare organizations can reduce unnecessary testing and help prevent missed diagnoses, and adverse patient outcomes. Physicians can use Lab Interpretation to manage challenging lab results, such as unusually low blood sugar, with concise guidance designed for immediate action — not only for evaluation, but also to determine if future lab tests are needed.
To learn more about UpToDate Advanced, please visit UpToDate® Advanced™ and visit Wolters Kluwer Health, booth #3232 at the HIMSS Conference in Las Vegas, March 3-5, 2018.
