HotTopics: Rx For Front-Line Medical Professionals: EMR-Enabling Performance Solutions

With busy, peripatetic schedules, no fixed workspaces, a voracious need for correct data and information, and little time, doctors, nurses, and other practicing healthcare professionals are the perfect audience for what Outsell defines as performance solutions

- electronic information products incorporated into workflow systems. This HotTopics looks at why electronic medical record (EMR)-enabling performance solutions are needed, the current state of the market, and essential actions for information providers that want to take advantage of the potential for supporting clinician workflows. A number of drivers make clinician performance solutions so hot right now, including the urgent need to reduce medical errors, explosions in drug development and medical research and publications, the use of evidence-based medicine (EBM) to link clinician decisions with the best possible evidence, and new generations of Internet-savvy patients who are doing their own research. Equally important, however, are a number of barriers that have caused clinician performance solutions to lag, including slow uptake of EMR systems, lack of standards, and the unsuitability of current medical literature and content for answering questions in clinical settings. This HotTopics describes an ideal performance solution, then evaluates existing offerings from mobile device providers Unbound Medicine and Epocrates, and the offerings from major medical publishers Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Thomson Micromedex, McGraw-Hill, and UpToDate. It concludes with a list of essential actions for content providers eager to participate in this growing market.