The following article appeared in Healthcare IT News a few days ago.
Diagnosis and treatment now a click-away
By Molly Merrill, Contributing Writer 11/16/07
RESTON, VA - Isabel Healthcare, a provider of diagnosis reminder systems, has partnered with Wolters Kluwer Health to provide clinicians with access to evidence-based medicine for both treatment and diagnosis.
Wolters Kluwer Health's decision-support system, called Clin-eguide, will be integrated with Isabel's Web-based decision-support system. Clin-eguide provides clinicians with evidence-based information on diagnosis, management and treatment. It incorporates content from Ovid, Facts & Comparisons, and Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins, as well as other publishers.
Clin-eguide can be integrated with electronic medical records or used on a stand-alone basis.
"Patients present with clinical features and Isabel is able to uniquely assist clinicians the quality of diagnosis decision making by processing clinical features into diagnoses," said Joseph Britto MD, CEO and co-founder of Isabel Healthcare.
Wolters Kluwer Health, based in Conshohocken, Pa, is a division of Wolters Kluwer, a provider of information and business intelligence for students, professionals and institutions in medicine, nursing, allied health, pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry.
Clinicians who already utilize Clin-eguide to check facts, review evidence, determine treatment and check drug interactions will now have access to Isabel.
Continue reading here:
http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=8150
It seems to me this is a substantial addition to the Wolters Kluwer Health product range. Users of many electronic data bases in the health sector will have been familiar for many years with the electronic journal offerings which are available via Ovid, Lippincott and Williams and Wilkins.
Adding the capabilities of Isabel (which provides suggestions, based on patient symptoms, to diagnostic possibilities which may not have occurred to the clinician) to this extensive array of reference sources, within a single portal, is a great idea.
Sadly the provision of these invaluable information services is not free. Can I suggest that whichever party wins the upcoming election – we have a commitment to make these services available to the Australian clinical community via a national license.
I suggest this would do more for patients in Australia in the short to medium term than we are likely to see from initiatives such as SNOMED and so one – while not diminishing for a moment the longer term value of such moves.
This can happen quickly, at relatively low cost, and with the CIAP experience in NSW being positively evaluated, there is no reason to delay.
David.
Indeed interesting but there is a number of distinct functions here; medication interactions or prescription reminders are very different kettles of fish to evidence based clinical guidance. The former two are easily available on a number of systems such as MyMedicalRecords etc., the later is where we could get into serious trouble as we've seen in WA with their installation of the clinical guidance tele-triage system. Systems such as Clinical Solutions (one of the applications we used at NHS Direct) will always eire on the side of caution and consequently we end up sending more people to A&E unnecessarily, wasting both time and money in the bargain. NHS Direct works despite, not because of, this system (largely due to the demographic and volume of calls). We need more true BI software houses getting involved in the intricacies of complex algorithm based clinical decision guidance based on mathematics as well as evidence based clinical knowledge. Perhaps the technology is already out there in another vertical? I wouldn't be at all surprised if we only need to re-apply it to health...
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