Medwise AI and eMed
Medwise AI offers a highly customisable search platform that surfaces clinical information from trusted and vetted professional knowledge resources. Healthcare organisations can tailor Medwise.ai further to include local and organisational clinical information.
With eMed’s growing skill mix of clinicians, it seemed fitting that they explore the benefits of the Medwise AI platform for their clinical workforce.
When making decisions about patient care, clinicians rely on a wide variety of information and knowledge resources including clinical guidelines from national and professional organisations, local care and referral pathways, antimicrobial guidance and clinical policies tailored to the local healthcare setting. However, many questions go unanswered due to resource fragmentation, lack of familiarity and lack of access. The challenge is deepened by the increasing complexity of health care delivery and the rapid expansion of medical knowledge.
Due to the lack of a single, central platform containing vetted and trustworthy clinical information, clinicians waste precious time and effort using general-purpose search engines to find trusted websites. Tools like Google Search mix professional clinical resources with patient-facing or out-of-date information from unvetted or irrelevant resources. Clinicians already have multiple tabs open on their devices so integrating platforms is preferable to using many separate ones.
Medwise AI offers a highly customisable search platform that surfaces clinical information from trusted and vetted professional knowledge resources. Healthcare organisations can tailor Medwise AI further to include local and organisational clinical information. With eMed’s growing skill mix of clinicians, it seemed fitting that they explore the benefits of the Medwise AI platform for their clinical workforce.
Collaboration Benefits
The collaboration between eMed and Medwise AI is an example of how digital health platforms and healthcare providers can work together to improve clinical solutions.
eMed wanted to pilot a solution that could provide their workforce with seamless access to relevant, evidence-based clinical information to increase decision-making confidence and improve patient care.
For Medwise AI, the partnership with eMed allowed the company to tailor their product for a multidisciplinary workforce in a telemedicine setting and to improve the platform through targeted user research.
Educational Benefits
Medwise AI tailored the platform to the information needs of eMed’s clinical workforce. eMed’s clinicians had access to a wide range of clinical knowledge resources for primary care as well as eMed’s own public and staff-only knowledge and information resources.
Members of eMed’s education and training team were given access to aggregated and anonymised search data, providing them with insights on interactions and on the topics searched.
The education team particularly valued the ability to divide the data by clinical role because it revealed differences in learning needs. This allowed the team to provide the most relevant educational content to fill practice-knowledge gaps for each clinical role. It also provided insights into areas where the information needs of the clinical workforce were not met. eMed’s education and training team was able to use a data-driven approach to the creation of internal guidelines and information sources for their workforce.
User Feedback
Medwise.ai was deployed and used by 30% of the clinical workforce at Babylon. The pilot received overwhelmingly positive feedback from clinicians, with 100% of respondents saying that Medwise AI improved their understanding of clinical topics.
Advanced Nurse Practitioners were the most common users of the platform during the pilot. More than half of clinicians surveyed reported that Medwise AI saved over 1 minute per search. Users also reported that having access to all of their commonly used resources in one place resulted in workflow efficiencies.
Source discovery was another benefit that users found while using Medwise AI. When searching for a clinical query, they were presented with sources of information that they had not used before.
Advanced Nurse Practitioners found the platform particularly helpful, reporting that they were able to save time when using Medwise AI to find clinical information during 4-hour sessions. Multiple users, including GPs, ANPs and clinical pharmacists, reported that having a single source of information resulted in being able to search multiple relevant sources at once and to pick the source that was best suited to their enquiry.
Conclusion
Innovative partnerships between digital health providers and healthcare organisations can deliver value to clinicians and patients while at the same time providing valuable insights to drive product development. eMed and Medwise AI demonstrate that deploying a tailored search platform within an organisation can positively impact clinician workflow and decision-making. At the same time, providing just-in-time answers to clinical questions offers an opportunity to fill practice-knowledge gaps and to provide more targeted education and training to a multi-disciplinary clinical workforce. From the patient’s perspective, it helps clinicians answer their questions in a more timely fashion.