How Wolters Kluwer Health is using AI-powered tools

For more than three decades, Wolters Kluwer Health has offered its UpToDate resources to answer clinician’s questions about treatments, medication and other information to support decisions.

Greg Samios, president & CEO at Wolters Kluwer Health Clinical Effectiveness, says AI tools are making it easier for clinicians and hospitals to use UpToDate.

But the company is aiming to provide more help to hospitals and health system leaders with new AI-powered tools. With Wolters Kluwer Health’s UpToDate Enterprise Edition, health systems can gain more insight in how clinicians are using the latest clinical resources, if it’s translating to better outcomes, and where treatment can be improved.

Greg Samios, president & CEO at Wolters Kluwer Health Clinical Effectiveness, recently spoke with Chief Healthcare Executive® about the efforts to provide more data and perspective for hospitals and health systems. He talked about how the company is aiming to go beyond providing value to individual users and offer more knowledge for health systems.

“This is now looking at aggregated data across their usage of clinicians,” Samios says.

“So it's a bit of a different value proposition than what we've offered in the past 30 years. But we definitely heard from hospital customers that they could use more clinical insights as they're thinking about different outcomes in the hospital, thinking about quality outcomes and clinical practice.”

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With UpToDate Enterprise Edition, health systems can see how clinicians are using the latest data and they can compare that usage with national and internal benchmarks, Samios says. Hospitals and health systems can gain additional information on the outcomes of their patients and whether clinicians should be doing more to take advantage of the latest information on certain conditions and treatments.

The new tools are being rolled out to the company’s enterprise customers. Such information can be valuable to health system leaders, Samios says.

“You can see high or low usage in different clinical areas, and you can link that to patient outcomes,” he says.

If clinicians aren’t getting the latest guidance and are seeing more negative outcomes, the hospital or health system can work with those clinicians, he says.

The company is seeing more usage of the new enterprise offerings among larger health systems and academic institutions, but mid-size health systems overseas are using the tools, Samios says. He adds that it’s not a heavy lift to begin using the platform and could be useful to a wide range of hospital systems looking to improve outcomes and potentially improve financially.

So far, Samios says the company has received encouraging feedback from hospitals. “We're really excited about this one,” he says.

While the company is aiming to offer more services to hospitals, Wolters Kluwer Health has also incorporated new AI tools to improve its UpToDate products used by clinicians for decision-making support.

For years, clinicians have typed a phrase or a couple of words, and they would be directed to a given section and look for the answer. Now, with the incorporation of AI tools, clinicians can find what they are looking for more quickly in a more natural search, the company says.

“Fewer clicks, less administrative burden, and it cuts down the time to get you to the answer to your clinical question,” Samios says. “And the nice part is, it is a word-for-word answer from UpToDate. It gets you to that trusted answer, but just does it really quickly.”

Samios says clinicians don’t face the risk of AI hallucinations and getting incorrect information, because the AI tools are drawing only from searches of UpToDate content, not the wider Internet at large and the potential for errant answers.

“We think it's the right answer to what clinicians have been asking for,” he syas.

Wolters Kluwer Health draws on the expertise of more than 7,500 authors and also employs a large editorial staff to ensure that UpToDate lives up to its name.

“We've been able to build a very robust process to keep the information constantly updated,” Samios says. “It goes through a deep vetting process to make sure that it is the evidence-based gold standard, and we're working with the experts in the field.”

Wolters Kluwer Health has also recently announced a collaboration with Abridge, which provides automated clinical documentation. Abridge uses AI to produce summaries of patient appointments, and the notes will include links to the latest clinical information from UpToDate.

In another collaboration, Wolters Kluwer is now teaming with Wellsheet, a company which streamlines workflows across electronic health record systems. In this collaboration, Wellsheet’s interface will include content from UpToDate.

Samios says the goal is to make it easier for clinicians to get the latest clinical information from UpToDate, with the goal of improving care for all patients and reducing disparities in outcomes.

He says the company is aiming to make sure that “we're delivering UpToDate wherever care is needed.”

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