Wolters Kluwer Health, a global provider of information for healthcare professionals and students, has announced the beta launch of POC Advisor™, an integrated clinical decision support and workflow management platform under development within its Innovation Lab. Introduced at the HIMSS14 Annual Conference & Exhibition (Booth #1346), POC Advisor helps reduce variability in care, thereby increasing quality and safety and lowering costs.
Leveraging unique, industry-leading clinical decision support and surveillance solutions combined with change management and advanced informatics services, POC Advisor delivers all the components necessary to impact care quality. It blends clinical knowledge management and decision support with clinician-friendly and mobile applications that access patient information from EMRs and other IT systems. Advanced analytics are then applied to create truly meaningful information that is delivered to clinicians at the point of care.
The initial focus of POC Advisor is on helping reduce deaths from and costs associated with sepsis - the single most expensive condition in U.S. hospitals. Each year approximately 1.6 million patients are diagnosed with and 258,000 die from sepsis, which carries an annual treatment price tag of $20 billion. It is a broad problem that requires system-wide change management, concurrent electronic surveillance, clinical decision support and data analytics.
The first pilot site, a top-tier community hospital in Northern California, has already provided an early demonstration of the platform's efficacy. Preliminary data show that, in just three months, POC Advisor yielded significant improvements in key sepsis process measures. These include an 80% compliance rate in patient screening protocols; a 90% rate ordering lactate tests on those patients who met criteria; and a 75% rate initiating Early Goal-Directed Therapy for those patients who met criteria.
