EBSCO Health and Isabel Healthcare (Isabel) have announced an expansion of their existing partnership. EBSCO Health will now sell the Isabel Symptom Checker to hospitals and healthcare organisations. The Isabel Symptom Checker serves as a patient engagement gateway to guide consumers and patients into and through an organisation's provider network.
Patients are going to the internet to search for health information. By providing them with a trusted source, organisations can improve the patient experience and drive them to appropriate resources and information. Patients enter their symptoms and receive a list of possible diagnoses. From there, the patient can be directed to the appropriate physicians, relevant clinical content, wellness programs, and patient education information and triaged to access the appropriate venue of care; all designed to reduce patient leakage and improve patient engagement. Access is provided from the consumer facing website or through patient portals, providing the organisation a consistent method to engage the patient in a number of touch points.
Isabel's Symptom Checker is based on the Isabel professional diagnosis decision support tool which has been peer reviewed, validated and used by physicians around the world to assist in diagnosis decisions for over 15 years. By providing access to a trusted source rather than general web searches, the patient-provider interaction can be more meaningful and efficient as the starting point has been elevated.
Isabel Healthcare's CEO Donald Bauman says patients are going online to find medical information and the Symptom Checker ensures they are getting their information from a trusted source of information. Resource such as symptom checker can improve usage of hospital websites and encourage patients to learn more about their symptoms as well as the clinicians and programs available.
Meaningful Use statutes require an increase in patient engagement. Isabel's Symptom Checker is a way sites can meet these requirements. The tool can also pull in content from patient education resources such as Health Library™ giving patients access to vetted, updated information that is easy to understand.
Using Symptom Checker, patients enter their symptoms and receive the top likely diagnoses and links to additional information. Patients are able to save, email and print the information. Hospitals can also include a triage tool that gives patients an indicator of whether they should call their doctor, make an appointment, or seek immediate care.
EBSCO Health and Isabel have previously partnered to integrate their clinical decision support tools DynaMed and Isabel, allowing mutual customers to link from one resource to another.
Isabel and EBSCO Health will be at HIMSS 2015 (EBSCO in booth #2661 and Isabel in the Business & Clinical Analytics/Intelligence Knowledge Center booth #5484-2). Donald Bauman will present on Engagement Tools to Drive Efficiency, Tuesday April 14, 11:30-12:00 in the Knowledge Center.
