Medispan Clinical Expands CDS Offerings by Wolters Kluwer Health

Since I know I have a number of EMR vendors that read this blog, I know they’ll be interested to learn the news coming out of Wolters Kluwer Health about a new clinical decision support (CDS) offering called Medi-Span Clinical. Here’s a part of the press release announcement:

Wolters Kluwer Health, a leading global provider of information for healthcare professionals and students, today unveiled Medi-Span® Clinical, a robust clinical decision support (CDS) platform that delivers the functionality, interoperability and medication-related CDS necessary to advance the practice of evidence-based medicine and to achieve meaningful use of health IT.

From the looks of their website page about Medi-Span Clinical, this looks like it’s the announcement of the features that they have listed nicely as “launching in 2010.”

APIs OFFERING CLINICAL DECISION SUPPORT
SCREENING INFORMATION LAUNCHING IN 2010
Drug Interactions™ API
Route Contraindications™ API
Drug Allergy™ API
Duplicate Therapy™ API
Dose Screening and Drug Orders™ API
Drug Disease Contraindications™ API
Pregnancy, Lactation, Age and Gender™ API

APIs OFFERING CLINICAL DECISION SUPPORT
REFERENCE INFORMATION
Trissel’s IV-CHEK™ API
Integrated MedFacts Module™ API
Integrated Drug Facts and Comparisons™ API
Drug Image and Imprint™ API

That’s quite a robust offering of services that can really benefit an EMR. I tried really hard to get our EMR to implement Medispan since that’s what our pharmacy uses. Unfortunately, they chose to integrate a different drug database mostly because of cost of Medi-Span I believe. We’ll see if they are regretting that after announcements like this.

I know there are a number of interesting API services like this out there. I’d be interested to hear more about EMR vendor and users experiences with the other people in the industry.

One other interesting piece from the press release:

“In addition to unprecedented interoperability, Medi-Span Clinical delivers advanced end-user controls over alerts and warnings that reduce the risk of ‘alert fatigue’ and drive adoption at the point-of-care,” said Subramanian. “By deploying Medi-Span Clinical within their EMRs, providers and vendors alike are able to advance the meaningful use of health IT and provide clinicians with the advanced point-of-care CDS they will actively embrace.”

I think that a third party service offering like this can really help an EMR vendor. It kind of makes sense to have it separated, but tightly integrated through an API. I’m sure it’s all a bit technical for many readers of my blog, but let’s just say it’s a good thing for the EMR industry for these capabilities to continue to improve.

Also, it should help an EMR vendor meet some of the meaningful use guidelines. Although, it does seem a bit gratuitous to use the buzzword meaningful use like this. I wonder if I’ll get any press releases that won’t include that term somewhere.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • Can you tell me any other DSS API’s or tools that can be integrated with an EMR? Consider a web based EMR focusing on Rule based alerts and specially for pediatrics, drugs, oncology, preventive care. thanks

  • Honestly, I don’t know of many other vendors that offer this type of API beyond Medispan. I know there’s quite a few drug database companies, but I haven’t seen many of them expanding their offering the way Medispan has done. You should ask this question on EMR Update. Lots of EMR vendors there that would know what other options are out there.

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