Bringing AI to UpToDate

Hospitals and health systems have been using UpToDate for clinical decision support for years, and Wolters Kluwer Health is aiming to make it easier and faster with generative AI.

Wolters Kluwer Health announced the introduction of UpToDate Expert AI in September.

Greg Samios, CEO of Wolters Kluwer Health, says the new evolution of UpToDate brings AI-powered technology to the company’s proprietary knowledge base of UpToDate content.

UpToDate taps the expertise of 7,600 contributors, which provide the answers to clinician queries.

But Samios says it’s not enough to have the speed and ease of generative AI to answer questions. With its new solution, generative AI is only applied to the knowledge and records in the UpToDate database. The AI technology is not randomly gathering information across the internet that may or may not be reliable.

By keeping the generative AI technology within UpToDate’s system, clinicians have a better chance of getting information that’s accurate, Samios says.

“It's a big differentiator,” he says. “It's the proprietary database we have, and it's just that proprietary database. This is the trusted source, and we're not bringing in noise from outside where, you know, there's a lot of bad advice that goes on, not maliciously, but it's just not accurate. And you don't want to have that roll into your model.”

In early feedback, physicians appreciate getting faster recommendations to their queries, Samios says. One user wrote online that he found UpToDate valuable in the past, but it wasn’t always able to provide an answer in a quick search during a shift.

The AI technology provides accelerated responses, Samios says. He notes speed is critical for certain physicians, such as those working in the emergency department.

Physicians “love the speed, love getting me to the right answer really quickly,” he says. But doctors are also saying that they’re getting quick responses with good information, he adds.

“Clinicians are pressed for time, and that's not getting any better,” Samios says. “So the ability to give them a solution that gets you right to that answer … and really happy that it's based on just our content. And that de-risking of the answer for both the clinician and the enterprise is a big deal.”

The accuracy is also critical for health systems, and 80% of UpToDate business is at enterprise-level, Samios says.

“Hospitals are buying for their clinicians, selling it to the C-suite, they want to make sure that what they're buying at an enterprise level is reliable, safe and auditable. That's really important,” he says.

UpToDate’s new AI tools also acknowledge certain assumptions in queries, and will outline them in answers.

If a clinician types in a question about a patient with a certain condition, the answer will reflect that the recommendation refers to someone who is an adult and not a child, or a patient who is not already in the hospital. As he notes, a pediatric patient would likely get a smaller dose of medication than an adult.

“Not only do you get that succinct answer, but you get the assumptions around it, which are really important,” Samios says.

“Those assumptions are really critical for delivering care,” he adds. “In health care, it's a high stakes industry, so you’ve got to get it right.”

Clinicians can also ask additional questions based on UpToDate’s initial response, says Sheila Bond, director of clinical content strategy at Wolters Kluwer Health.

“If you want to know more specifically or dive deeper into any one of these disorders, you can ask your follow up question, where we've repopulated again based on the content,” Bond says.

With generative AI tools gaining more use in (and outside of) health care, Samios says the company wanted to be sure it could bring AI technology effectively and safely to UpToDate. Even with the growing popularity of AI tools, he says it was critical to get it right.

“We really had both the clinician user experience and the enterprise value proposition in mind before we launched this,” Samios says. “And the biggest thing was obviously the quality side. We wouldn't launch anything until we said the quality is where it has to be.”

Samios says he doesn’t see the growth of other AI tools as a threat to UpToDate.

“We do know our users will experiment with new technologies that come out,” he says. “We completely expect that. I think the industry in general sees clinicians trying new things out.”

“At the end of the day, this is health care, and so it's high stakes, and our clinicians are committing to deliver the best care possible,” Samios says. “And we've got a brand that has been around for a long time, and they know that's going to deliver the best recommendation and the best care for their patients.”

Bond adds that the company is eager to get more reactions from clinicians using the AI-powered version of UpToDate.

“We do thrive on feedback,” she says. “And I think that'll be an exciting phase for us, given the amount of users we have and how connected they are with us.”