Right when you think Wolters Kluwer might just let everyone else have all the AI fun, it debuted UpToDate Expert AI to give the world’s most widely used clinical decision support tool a much-needed AI overhaul.
Wolters Kluwer took its time with the launch. The incumbent CDS juggernaut is used by 3M doctors worldwide, so it had plenty of users to disappoint with a hasty roll out.
- That said, nimble competition has been gaining ground pretty much as fast as it takes to download OpenEvidence from the App Store.
- The good news is that WK made the most of the extra development time.
Here’s what sets UpToDate Expert AI apart. Unlike general-purpose chatbots, the AI-enhanced version of UpToDate is built exclusively on WK’s peer-reviewed content library.
- It draws on 30+ years of evidence-based research authored by 7,600 experts, rather than the open web or selective journals.
- That allows it to quickly answer complex clinical questions, while surfacing all of its sources, assumptions, and step-by-step reasoning directly in the response. Probably safe to assume that also helps with hallucinations.
- Those answers still manage to be easy to scan at the bedside and will look extremely familiar to any doctor that’s ever read an UpToDate article (or one that’s been reading them for a decade).
The extra time in the oven means that more features are baked in. Wolters Kluwer knows its audience, and UpToDate Expert AI’s biggest leg up on the competition is its fine-tuning for health systems.
- Enterprise-grade governance, compliance, and workflow integration are all standard out-of-the-box, giving UpToDate Expert AI an advantage for a system-wide implementation over OpenEvidence or Doximity.
The Takeaway
It turns out that the 800-pound clinical support gorilla wasn’t going to let the newcomers eat its lunch forever, and UpToDate Expert AI gives health systems plenty of reasons to keep rolling with Wolters Kluwer.
