IBM Watson Health and EBSCO partner up

March 13, 2020 Off By Dino Mustafić

IBM Watson Health and EBSCO Information Services Thursday announced a strategic collaboration aimed towards enhancing clinical decision support (CDS) and operations for healthcare providers and health systems.

The companies are combining their respective solution suites – DynaMed® and IBM® Micromedex® with Watson™ – into a single, high-value global solution called “DynaMed and Micromedex with Watson.” The combined solution suite will be designed to bring together drug and disease content, into a single source for evidence-based insights to help inform clinical decisions.

DynaMed provides peer-reviewed clinical content, including systematic literature reviews in 28 specialties for comprehensive disease topics, health conditions, and abnormal findings to highly focused topics on evaluation, differential diagnosis, and management. The content undergoes a rigorous, seven-step process, giving clinicians access to current, evidence-based diagnostic and therapeutic recommendations. IBM Micromedex is one of the largest online reference databases for medication information. It is used by more than 4,500 hospitals and health systems worldwide to support decision-making in medication therapy management, disease and condition management, toxicology, alternative medicine and patient education.

“Research shows that healthcare provider confidence in clinical decision support comes from knowing the evidence-based methodologies that helped build the content foundation,” said Anil Jain, Vice President, Chief Health Officer, IBM Watson Health. “When clinicians are confident that their clinical decision support is drawing recommendations from accurate and timely information, they are more likely to use the technology to support their care decisions.”  

IBM Micromedex with Watson is designed to use artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to bypass keyword searches in favor of a more conversational approach to searching drug content. DynaMed and Micromedex with Watson will be designed to provide clinicians direct access to drug and disease content at the point-of-care to support clinical decision making. 

“The synergy of our world class, evidence-based content is expected to drive efficiencies for more healthcare systems using data-driven insights for decision making,” said Betsy Jones, Executive Vice President, EBSCO Clinical Decisions. “Built on the latest cloud-based technology, we will harness world class content from DynaMed and IBM Micromedex onto a seamless and personalized solution. A terrific alternative for the care team.”

“When it comes to clinical decision support, content is king. Nearly nine out of 10 physicians in the US currently implement electronic health record technology” said Todd Nolen, General Manager, IBM Micromedex Solutions, IBM Watson Health. “We believe DynaMed and Micromedex with Watson can deliver value and innovation to healthcare organizations, to help enable rapid access to high-quality medical evidence that is essential for clinicians as they work to provide safe and effective patient care within their clinical workflow.”