Doctor, doctor, give me the news!
Jinfo Blog

By Joanna Ptolomey

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It is conference season, I have been on the road a lot, and to boot there has been a flurry of some interesting industry news these last few weeks - so it is time for a roundup.

CPM Resource Center (CPM), a business unit of Elsevier Clinical Decision Support, has launched a further product - CPM CarePoints Emergency. CPM CarePoints are a pre-built implementation readymade solution for many clinical settings and they bring many benefits.

I worked as a clinical librarian integrated into clinical teams and it was very often the case that a decision had to be made quickly. This process requires access to the best evidence via clinical decision support systems at the point of need in a healthcare setting.

This improves quality and speed of workflow, staff consistency in treatment and care of patients not only within a department but also between departments. It can also have good outcomes for re-admission rates and shorter time spent in hospital.

Apart from high quality evidence-based content such as clinical guidelines and therapies, managing patient care planning and related document processes is important. These types of products are now the norm in a clinical setting for decision making.

Let’s move to another decision making tool - this time in the pharmaceutical sector and the field of drug research and development. My attention was turned by the recent launch of Thomson Reuter’s competitive intelligence (CI) solution Cortellis.

In drug development the best solution is to be able to integrate current CI drug pipeline news such as deal information, patent fillings, breaking industry news and conference coverage, and merge it with your own in-house data. The Cortellis product allows this and is also compatible with mobile devices including smartphones and tablet devices. Can we really say the mobile trend is continuing when it now seems to be the norm.

Both these tools are about decision making for healthcare stakeholders/providers but what about other stakeholders such as patients? The BBC reported a few days ago that one in six people in the UK have literacy levels of an 11 year old this and this can have serious effects on your healthcare outcomes. This major problem could have catastrophic effects on an individual – for example in the management of their medication and with the understanding and appraising of health information for shared decision making with their clinician.

The general public is not expected to understand medical jargon and as such much literature is provided for patient use in order to manage chronic conditions, acute situations and daily activities. New exciting drug pipeline products and best practice evidence-based continuity of care do make a huge difference to health outcomes, but ignoring social and educational issues in the general population, who may have poor literacy levels, may aggregate out these positive effects in the longer term.

Whilst I look forward to new exciting product development I always bear in mind the bigger holistic picture, and that is something to think about.

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