Impacting organizational metrics with UpToDate Enterprise Edition

Modern health systems have to keep pace with rapid changes in technological innovations and in the growing complexities of their own organizations. As needs evolve, achieving goals for both care quality and organizational efficiency becomes harder to balance.

UpToDate Enterprise Edition was designed to support these goals with enhanced analytics. Customers are addressing quality improvements and shaping education programming within their organizations by referencing data from clinician usage.

Explore how early adopters of UpToDate Enterprise Edition are leveraging advanced analytics to reduce risk, save costs, and improve clinical decision-making

Download Analytics Use Cases
Download Analytics Use Cases

Enhancing compliance and education

Supports quality initiatives, regulatory requirements (including MATE Act), and identifies clinician learning opportunities.

Improving patient outcomes

Helps reduce surgical site infections (SSIs) through targeted insights.

Strengthening clinical support

Provides actionable data to reduce risk and bolster decision-making at the point of care.

  • Save costs

  • Ongoing education

  • Reduce SSIs

  • Improve compliance

Support quality and regulatory challenge

Challenge

Healthcare organizations need to ensure that care practices continually align with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) standards. UpToDate not only provides evidence-based clinical guidelines but also aids administrators responsible for managing accreditation and reporting.

To ensure compliance and patient safety, CMS works with healthcare organizations to conduct a root cause analysis (RCA). CMS regulatory actions typically involve:

  • Identification: CMS identifies an issue or event triggering the RCA, often due to regulatory noncompliance or adverse patient outcomes.
  • Immediate jeopardy: CMS evaluates whether the issue poses immediate risks to patient safety, requiring urgent action.
  • RCA requirement: CMS mandates the healthcare provider to conduct an RCA, identifying the root causes and contributing factors.
  • Review: CMS reviews the RCA findings to ensure they address the issues and identify effective corrective actions.
  • Corrective Action Plan (CAP): CMS may require a CAP based on RCA findings, detailing steps to prevent recurrence.
  • Monitoring: CMS monitors the implementation of the CAP, ensuring compliance, with potential penalties for non-compliance.
  • Documentation: CMS requires detailed documentation of the RCA process, which may be reviewed in future audits or investigations.

Actions and impact

This customer used the clinical decision support information in UpToDate to successfully appeal a CMS finding, saving the organization over $100,000 in civil regulatory penalties. By using UpToDate usage data, they were able to demonstrate that their practices were in line with regulatory standards, resulting in a favorable outcome in one particular RCA.

Additionally, using the aggregate data in the analytics portal, the customer was able to support RCA investigations, recognize additional concerning patterns, and demonstrate that any CAP steps were being followed. This highlights the portal’s potential as a tool for defending the organization’s practices in regulatory reviews, audits, or other quality assurance processes. The team recognized the portal’s value in supporting documentation and evidence-based arguments during peer reviews and regulatory inspections.

Organization type

Hospitals and health systems

Key roles involved

Chief Medical Officer (CMO),
Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO),
Chief Quality Officer/VP of Quality, Risk Management

Feature used: Analytics Dashboard

This proactive approach not only enhanced regulatory compliance but also contributed to better overall healthcare quality. By leveraging UpToDate and its analytics capabilities, the organization ensured compliance with CMS standards, improved patient safety, and saved over $100,000 in civil regulatory penalties.

Identify educational opportunities

Challenge

A GME program coordinator manages the daily operations of residency and fellowship programs, ensuring compliance with accreditation standards. They use data to track the progress of residents and fellows, monitor program compliance, and support continuous quality improvement. This data-driven approach helps in learning and reinforcing best practice decisions and maintaining the program’s accreditation.

The GME coordinator and CMIO of a major multi-state health system collaborated to review UpToDate utilization patterns to identify if there were learning gaps in understanding among their residents.

Actions and impact

The team used a three-step approach to uncover insights and address the identified opportunities:

  • Isolate a specific service line: To understand whether the utilization data represents an area of educational opportunity, it was suggested to isolate a specific service line. In this case, they focused on internal medicine, their highest volume service line.
  • Utilization data analysis: The utilization data showed that the topic “Initial assessment and management of acute stroke” had significantly higher usage among medical students and residents. This topic aligned with a diagnostic-related group (DRG) with high readmission rates and potential for secondary stroke.
  • Comparison and curriculum development: The findings led to a comparison between the utilization data of the internal medicine residents and medical students to the patient DRG data within their assigned clinical cohort. Upon uncovering a meaningful variance, findings would lead to additional focused curricula on primary stroke identification.

Organization type

Hospital systems with Graduate Medical Education (GME) programs

Key roles involved

Chief Medical Officer (CMO),
Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO),
GME leadership

Feature Used: Analytics Dashboard

This proactive approach not only enhanced regulatory compliance but also contributed to better overall healthcare quality. By leveraging UpToDate and its analytics capabilities, the organization ensured compliance with CMS standards, improved patient safety, and saved over $100,000 in civil regulatory penalties.

Reduce surgical site infections (SSIs)

Challenge

Surgical Site Infections (SSIs) are a significant problem because they can lead to serious complications, including prolonged hospital stays, readmissions, increased healthcare costs, delayed recovery, and even life-threatening conditions like sepsis. SSIs can also result in additional surgeries, impaired wound healing, and long-term disability, ultimately reducing the overall quality of patient care and outcomes.

Specific medication protocols, including antibiotics, antiseptics, and glycemic control medications, are in place at healthcare organizations to reduce the likelihood of SSIs. For organizations experiencing a high rate of SSIs, it is imperative to understand whether clinicians are following these protocols.

To determine an organization’s risk for increased SSIs, UpToDate usage data can be used to identify less frequently accessed topics and highlight areas where additional resources or training might be necessary. For instance, if infection control measures, SSI prevention, or treatment topics are not being accessed as often as expected based on the organization’s surgical occurrence rates, this could indicate a gap to be addressed.

Actions and impact

By looking at data from a different perspective, one organization was able to uncover and address likely gaps in knowledge and protocol adherence.

  • Focus on least-used topics: Rather than focusing on the top-used UpToDate topics, this organization focused on the topics used the least and compared them against the key medications needed in SSI prevention protocols.
  • Collaboration with UpToDate customer success team: Upon uncovering discrepancies, the organization collaborated with the UpToDate customer success team to ensure key clinical users and specialties were aware of and using the analytics resources available to them through the enterprise portal. Growing usage in particular drug topics indicated a successful awareness campaign.

Organization type

Health systems, hospitals, acute care

Key roles involved

Chief Medical Officer (CMO),
Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO),
Chief Quality Officer (CQO)

Feature Used: Analytics Dashboard

By leveraging UpToDate analytics data, the organization was able to identify and address gaps in knowledge and protocol adherence, ultimately reducing the incidence of SSIs and improving patient outcomes. This proactive approach not only enhanced patient safety but also contributed to better surgical success rates and overall healthcare quality.

Reduce risk and enhance clinician support – MATE Act compliance

Challenge

Medication Access and Training Expansion (MATE) Act compliance is essential for maintaining regulatory standards, enhancing patient safety, managing risks, and ensuring the overall quality of care. It supports operational efficiency and helps build trust with patients and stakeholders.

The MATE Act requires all DEA-registered practitioners to complete 8 hours of training on the treatment and management of patients with opioid and other substance use disorders. UpToDate offers a selection of eligible topics that allows providers to choose those most relevant to their practice, accruing the required Continuing Medical Education (CME) credit while using their time efficiently and increasing satisfaction. Adhering to the MATE Act aligns with best practices in medication management and contributes to the overall quality of care provided by the hospital. It supports a systematic approach to managing high-risk medications and improving patient outcomes.

Actions and impact

The health system implemented a standardized approach to remind users of the MATE-eligible CME topics available in UpToDate and the ease of fulfilling their requirements in this convenient way. The analytics report helped them target their recipients and monitor results.

  • Customized CME accrual: Customers can work with their UpToDate Customer Success team to remind users that they can use UpToDate to accrue and submit CME for MATE-eligible topics, rather than taking generalized training not specific to a clinician’s practice.
  • Monitoring educational efforts: Customers can monitor the response to educational efforts promoting UpToDate as a source for mandatory CME.

“When I first heard about the DEA’s new requirement (MATE Act), I looked at a variety of courses to meet it. They all had blocks of time spent on content that wasn’t relevant to my patients or how I practice. I was excited to learn that I could choose topics from UpToDate that supported my patient population while helping me earn the needed CME credits. It turned what felt like a burden into a win."

Organization type

Hospitals and health systems

Key roles involved

Chief Executive Officer (CEO),
Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO),
Credentialing teams

Feature Used: Analytics Dashboard

By leveraging UpToDate and its analytics capabilities, the health system ensured compliance with the MATE Act, enhanced clinician support, and improved patient outcomes. This proactive approach not only maintained regulatory standards but also increased clinician satisfaction by allowing them to focus on relevant, practice-specific content.

Expanding insights to drive future impact

Female doctor using a laptop and taking notes in a hospital room

As more health systems explore more ways to leverage the power of clinical decision support (CDS) data within their organizations, it can help teams collaborate.

UpToDate Enterprise Edition analytics capabilities continue to expand for more in-depth insights on utilization and potential strategic improvements.

Learn About Analytics
Learn About Analytics

  • National benchmarking

    The tool will provide national average utilization data for health systems to compare against their internal data “to make your data more actionable and give you context,” explains Jim Albrittain, Head of Product Marketing for UpToDate.

  • Summary insights landing page

    Albrittain describes this new feature as “an executive opportunity dashboard to proactively elevate potential variation or opportunities” within a particular organization’s utilization data. As part of this landing page, there will also be an aggregation of topic utilization by chronic condition and disease state to help reduce search time in cases where a single disease may comprise dozens of UpToDate articles, or a single drug class may contain too many individual drugs too search one-by-one.

  • Data exporting

    While simple on its face, the ability to export tables and dashboards from the analytics portal will open up broader data portability, enabling health systems to incorporate underlying utilization data from their CDS analytics projects into their greater data warehouse and wider analytics programs.

Ready to learn more about UpToDate Enterprise Edition?

Submit an information request and a representative will contact you shortly about UpToDate Enterprise Edition, our new offering exclusively for health systems.

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