Reference Manuals May Be Facing Obsolescence

We must ensure their relevance to contemporary patient care By LONNY REISMAN, MD It’s 1992 and disruptive technologies of the day are making headlines: AT&T releases the first color videophone; scientists start accessing the World Wide Web; Apple launches the PowerBook Duo. In healthcare, with less fanfare, a Harvard physician named Dr. Burton “Bud” Rose converts his entire nephrology textbook onto a floppy disk, launching the clinical tool that would ultimately become UpToDate. Instead of flipping through voluminous medical reference texts, such as the Washington Manual, doctors could for the first time input keywords to find the clinical guidance they needed to make better treatment decisions. The medical community embraced UpToDate’s unique ability to put knowledge at their fingertips. Today more than 1.7 million clinicians around the world use UpToDate to provide evidence-based patient care with confidence. For many, it along with other reference sources has become foundational to providing high quality medical care. More than just an easy-to-use reference, UpToDate has gone on to improve patient outcomes, according to the Journal of Hospital Medicine. In the new era of 21st century digital medicine, however, there are opportunities to go further in support of clinicians and patients. Reference tools must be powered by predictive and prescriptive analytics, be personalized to individual patient circumstances, and ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Tech Health Technology Physicians Evidence Based Medicine Guidelines Lonny Reisman reference manuals UptoDate Source Type: blogs