November 2, 2017 – Wolters Kluwer Health today announced that Baton Rouge General will deploy POC Advisor™, leveraging its clinical surveillance and analytics to reduce sepsis mortality and morbidity rates. The clinical intelligence platform will be a central component of the “Most Wired” hospital’s overall clinical and technology strategy.

“Using advanced technology is key to preserving and restoring health,” said Bennett Cheramie, Vice President of Information Technology at Baton Rouge General. “By making our front-line team members aware of patients with sepsis, POC Advisor will help us treat sepsis in its earliest stages.”

As September draws to a close, so does this year’s “Sepsis Awareness Month.” 

With the hopes of extending attention beyond this month on a condition that kills someone every 2 minutes in America, we reached out to Sean Benson, Vice President and General Manager of Specialized Surveillance, Wolters Kluwer Health, to learn more about sepsis’ impacts and the factors hospital administrators ought to consider when creating an effective plan of action to improve health outcomes and lower cost at the same time. 

Mr. Benson co-founded ProVation Medical, now part of Wolters Kluwer Health, in 1994. He has been closely involved in most areas of the company’s operations, including Research & Development, Product Management, Sales, Marketing, Business Development and Client Services. Most recently, he has overseen the company’s newest clinical surveillance platform, POC Advisor.

(Editor’s note: To hear audio excerpts of this interview, click on the media player buttons that run throughout this article.)

Wolters Kluwer Health and Vocera Communications,  (VCRA) have teamed to arm Halifax Health with a high-powered surveillance solution to advance its battle against sepsis. Linking the real-time clinical surveillance and analytics of the POC Advisor platform with Vocera’s hands-free communications technology and mobile app accelerates the diagnosis of sepsis and the timely delivery of patient-specific advice to nurses and other clinical staff at the point of care.

“Time is the enemy when it comes to sepsis, with the likelihood of death increasing by 8 percent for each hour that passes without treatment,” said Ginny Kwong, M.D., Vice President and Chief Medical Information Officer for Halifax Health. “Complicating early diagnosis is the need to aggregate data scattered across multiple clinical systems before it can be analyzed, and the results communicated to the point of care in a meaningful way.

Justin Clark, Clinical Program Manager-Pharmacy, Fellowship Director for Pharmacy OneSource, Wolters Kluwer Health

Antimicrobial stewardship is receiving unprecedented national and international focus. Healthcare organizations that have not implemented impactful, sustainable initiatives to combat drug-resistant infections will soon have to bolster efforts as numerous U.S. regulatory initiatives converge to prioritize improvement.

In addition to national measures, the United Nations—in a rare move—recently approved a declaration addressing antimicrobial resistance. This action marks only the fourth occurrence of the UN General Assembly taking up a health issue and further substantiates the severity of the growing problem.

The reality is that inappropriate use of antibiotics is rampant in today’s hospitals and health systems. Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggest that anywhere between 20 percent and 50 percent of antibiotics prescribed in the United States are either unnecessary or inappropriate. These subpar prescribing practices exacerbate the problem of resistance, create safety risks for patients, and lead to an increase in resistant microorganisms or bacteria, which currently account for U.S. costs as high as $34 billion.

Most hospitals and health systems recognize the threat and practice antimicrobial stewardship on some level. While this is an important step forward, the scope of the problem requires standardized adoption of best practices across healthcare. Strategies must mature to encompass a formal antimicrobial stewardship program (ASP), where expectations and accountability for high performance are driven from the top.

Wolters Kluwer Health announced today that it has signed an agreement to acquire Emmi Solutions (Emmi), one of the leading U.S. providers of patient engagement solutions, for $170 million in cash.

Founded in 2002, Emmi is a leading provider of comprehensive and interactive patient engagement solutions supporting healthcare providers and insurance carriers in delivering effective healthcare.  Patient engagement solutions encourage patients to more actively participate in their healthcare, thereby improving outcomes and potentially reducing healthcare costs. Emmi’s offerings are a natural extension to our existing Clinical Solutions portfolio, in particular to UpToDate in decision support and Lexicomp and Medi-Span in drug information.

Emmi offers an enterprise-wide, integrated, and multi-media patient engagement platform with high quality, peer-reviewed content and personalized communications that span the spectrum of care from prevention, to treatment, to patient follow-up.  The company’s solutions are highly rated for ease of integration with electronic medical records (EMR) systems, technical capabilities, and overall user experience.

Stephen Claypool, MD, Medical Director, POC Advisor, Wolters Kluwer

“Evaluating the Impact of a Computerized Surveillance Algorithm and Decision Support System on Sepsis Mortality,” appeared in the June print edition of The Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA). This study examined how clinicians at Alabama’s Huntsville Hospital decreased sepsis-related deaths by 53 percent during a 10-month period using a combination of clinical change management and electronic alerting from POC Advisor, a highly-accurate clinical decision support (CDS) software.

To learn more about this important implementation, we contacted Dr. Claypool, MD, Medical Director, POC Advisor, Wolters Kluwer.

(Editor’s note: To hear audio excerpts of this interview, click on the media player buttons that run throughout this article.)

Stephen Claypool, MD, Medical Director, POC Advisor, Wolters Kluwer

It’s been just a few weeks since boxing legend and activist Mohamand Ali died of sepsis, a condition that still remains greatly a mystery to many outside and inside healthcare. 

In our previous worked focusing upon sepsis, we learned several discrepancies exist in incidence and mortality reporting due to the host of definitions and terminologies used for sepsis in the field.

Formally, sepsis definitions have been largely unchanged for more than two decades, that is, until the recent publication of “Assessment of Clinical Criteria for Sepsis: For the Third International Consensus Definitions for Sepsis and Septic Shock (Sepsis-3)“.

There are now only two identified stages of sepsis: Sepsis and septic shock, as the new sepsis-3 definitions are designed to apply only to patients with life-threatening organ dysfunction caused by a dysregulated host response to infection. “Severe” sepsis is no longer used in the terminology and the milder stage of sepsis that was identified as “sepsis” by SIRS+ (Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome) criteria is no longer recognized. With this new definition, “sepsis” now best correlates with the old version’s status of severe sepsis.

Seeking clarification, we decided to contact Dr. Claypool, MD, Medical Director, POC Advisor, Wolters Kluwer for his thoughts on these recent definition changes and how they may impact physicians and the patients.

(Editor’s note: To hear audio excerpts of this interview, click on the media player buttons that run throughout this article.)

The Health division of Wolters Kluwer, a leading global provider of information and point of care solutions for the healthcare industry, announced today that The Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) has published a study by researchers Sharad Manaktala, MD, PhD, et al. detailing a significant reduction in sepsis mortality using automated surveillance and real-time analysis. The study examines how clinicians at Alabama’s Huntsville Hospital decreased sepsis-related deaths by 53 percent during a 10-month period using a combination of clinical change management and electronic alerting from POC Advisor, a highly-accurate clinical decision support (CDS) software. The system’s alerts detect sepsis early and guide clinicians to deliver the appropriate treatment, resulting in a breakthrough in alert accuracy, reaching 95 percent sensitivity and 82 percent specificity during the study period.

The study, “Evaluating the Impact of a Computerized Surveillance Algorithm and Decision Support System on Sepsis Mortality,” is currently available online and will appear in the June print edition of JAMIA.

The Health division of Wolters Kluwer a leading global provider of information and point of care solutions for the healthcare industry, will announce the findings of its study on the impact of real-time clinical surveillance and data analytics on an Alabama hospital’s sepsis mortality rates at the Becker’s Hospital Review 7th Annual Meeting Stephen Claypool, MD, Medical Director, Clinical Software Solutions at Wolters Kluwer, and Joycelyn Craighead, Director of Quality at Huntsville Hospital, will discuss how the hospital’s use of Wolters Kluwer’s POC Advisor generated a 53 percent reduction in sepsis-related deaths during the 10-month study period. The complete study will appear in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) later this year.

The presentation, “Life-Saving Data: How Integrating Real-time Surveillance and Analytics in Clinical Systems Reduced Sepsis Mortality at Huntsville Hospital,” will take place Friday, April 29 from 4:15-4:55 p.m. at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago.

Sepsis has received increased national attention in recent months with the tragic death of actress Patty Duke and the release of new sepsis definitions and clinical criteria by the Third International Consensus Definitions Task Force. The addition of sepsis to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services 2016 core measures has further increased the sense of urgency around improving early diagnosis and treatment to bring down the human and financial toll of sepsis, which claims an estimated 258,000 lives and costs more than $20 billion to treat each year in the U.S.