Global clinical technology company Wolters Kluwer Health is extending its integration with electronic health record (EHR) company Epic to allow UpToDate Enterprise customers and their patients access to patient education content directly within the Epic EHR and MyChart patient portal.
“If you are an UpToDate Enterprise customer, which means you get access to our full range of professional content for clinical decision support, we are closing that loop on that harmonization offer, and we’re saying you cannot really do the clinical part, and the professional part without the patient piece,” Julie Frey, vice president of provider for clinical effectiveness at Wolters Kluwer Health, told MobiHealthNews.
Wolters Kluwer released its UpToDate Enterprise Suite at HIMSS24 in Orlando last year. The offering is structured to provide large healthcare systems and plans with tools for evidence-based clinical decision support with real-world insights as well as assistance with navigating medical guidelines.
Through the expanded integration with Epic, UpToDate Enterprise Suite customers can provide patients with Wolters’ full library of patient education resources directly through Epic’s Clinical Reference tool.
The library contains educational material on over 7,000 topics and will be available in numerous languages.
Clinicians can access the tools, print them or send them through their preferred patient education workflow tool. In turn, patients will have 24/7 access to the full library via their MyChart portal.
“If a patient has an app on their phone, they will get it there, and that will be available anytime,” Frey said. “Patients are really taking a different role in their care. And there is this whole theme of more of a patient-centric approach.”
Additionally, healthcare systems will have access to analytics data on the type of materials patients are viewing and in what languages they read the material.
“[The analytics are] giving health administrators kind of unprecedented insights into how both clinicians and patients are using the patient education content,” Frey said.
“We’re also going to launch an analytics dashboard, which is going to display the usage through different methods and help you, as an administrator, understand where and how the content is used, and that ultimately is going to give them visibility into opportunities to close gaps.”
The patient education material will be provided to UpToDate Enterprise customers using Epic’s EHR without an additional charge.
Frey says several customers are already using the tool, while others are assigned to getting it up and running. Still, Frey says an opportunity exists to expand access to the patient ed material beyond Epic’s platform.
“Epic is the biggest, from an EHR footprint, of our customers by far. Ultimately, the goal of the strategy is to have patient education material, the vast library, and all the languages be ubiquitous, regardless of what kind of workflow tool a clinician is using. So, if we can land it, and if we can partner in the right way, I’d love to make this available across the full EHR space,” Frey said.
Additionally, she relayed that Wolters Kluwer Health is considering how to work with ambient documentation companies.
“How nice would it be if an ambient tool understood the conversation, you know, say the doctor is talking to the patient about hypertension. How nice to automatically suggest the right patient education material to send and reduce some of that administrative work for the clinician. So, that’s kind of the big ambition beyond the initial launch,” Frey said.
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