Delivering ‘gold-standard care’ abroad and throughout the hospital

UpToDate in action throughout the medical center

“I openly have a codependent relationship with UpToDate. I'm not ashamed to admit it,” Hayden says. “I can't imagine providers back in the day who had to come up with everything from a textbook or off the top of their head. That [thought] gives me fear.”

She first encountered UpToDate in her advanced practice registered nurse (APRN) training process and “got attached to it.” She went on to use it “pretty much every day in my practice” in a variety of settings including:

• Level 2 trauma facility
• Emergency room
• Walk-in care centers
• Family practice
• Correctional medicine within local prisons
• School-based health integrated within local school systems

“UpToDate is not limited to outpatient clinic or in-hospital use,” Hayden says. “It’s multifaceted, and I don't have to learn a new platform in each practice area to get the information I need.”

UpToDate Expert AI speeds up workflow

Girard Medical Center is piloting UpToDate® Expert AI, a generative AI-powered functionality layered on top of trusted, evidence-based UpToDate care recommendations. Hayden has been enthusiastic to explore its capabilities in accelerating research, saving time, and zeroing in on patient-specific guidance.

She recalls a recent patient who had a UTI that was multidrug resistant. “The pharmacist, the physician, the lab tech, and myself were all at a table trying to rack our brains. We were asking ‘What can we do? What have other people done? Is this something that's happening across the space, and we just don’t know about it?’”

Hayden turned to UpToDate Expert AI, which allowed her to use conversational language to describe the patient and ask for guidance on a drug that could appropriately treat the UTI considering the lab results. “It gave me some pretty solid choices, and it was very consistent with our repeat culture to try to identify a drug that would work for the patient,” she reports.

With traditional UpToDate, Hayden says, “if you were going to search [for treatment guidance], you did have to be smart enough to use [the appropriate] key terms to get what you needed. The more you used UpToDate, the more you learned. The AI is going to be great for those new users who don't know the key terms. They can put their question into that broad space. And then, I really like how it gives [the user] feedback” to refine their query. She adds that she appreciates UpToDate Expert AI providing an organized summary response with hyperlinks to enable further research on related topics as needed.

The value of evidence-based tools in rural communities and for training new clinicians:

Girard Medical Center is a federally designated Critical Access Hospital, which Hayden notes, means resources are often limited. “We have to use every platform that we're purchasing to the fullest. Otherwise, we're doing an injustice to our organization by spending money and not getting the full bang for our buck.”

In that spirit, the hospital recently expanded access to UpToDate beyond provider physicians to the entire organization. Hayden is “excited” at the opportunity this opens to nursing professionals and support staff.

“When new providers come [on staff], whether they’re a physician or a nurse practitioner, the scariest provider is the one who thinks they know everything,” she says “UpToDate is really great at helping you learn what you don't know. The best providers that you will find coming out of school are the ones that say, ‘I don't know, but let me use my tools to find out.’ UpToDate helps fill that void so you're not having to go to your partner every time and ask for help. You're able to research on your own, and you get solid data and evidence-based practice to help guide your decision-making. Then you can compare that with your clinical experience – or sometimes lack thereof – and make this solid choice with a good foundation of evidence.”

Hayden encourages her new providers to use UpToDate “to identify what you don't know and challenge yourself. You think you know the treatment plan for this; let's go double check it.”

For nurses and NPs using UpToDate, Hayden says UpToDate helps them form differential diagnoses, better understand treatments, and supports “meaningful conversations” with patients. She says it benefits nursing staff “anytime a platform will actually give us progressive movement and not barriers – because we have so many barriers as nurses in healthcare. Many platforms that ideally should be tools for us end up being hindrances. I've never had that experience with UpToDate.”

Discover how UpToDate clinical decision support is helping clinicians and healthcare leaders achieve care quality and strategic goals by exploring more UpToDate Customer Success Stories.