Wolters Kluwer Health Launches POC Advisor to Initially Address Sepsis Mortality Rates, Treatment Costs

MINNEAPOLIS, MN — February 24, 2014— Wolters Kluwer Health, a leading global provider of information for healthcare professionals and students, announced today the beta launch of POC Advisor™, an integrated clinical decision support and workflow management platform under development within its Innovation Lab. Introduced at the HIMSS14 Annual Conference & Exhibition (Booth #1346), POC Advisor helps reduce variability in care, thereby increasing quality and safety and lowering costs.

Leveraging unique, industry-leading clinical decision support and surveillance solutions combined with change management and advanced informatics services, POC Advisor delivers all the components necessary to impact care quality. It blends clinical knowledge management and decision support with clinician-friendly and mobile applications that access patient information from EMRs and other IT systems. Advanced analytics are then applied to create truly meaningful information that is delivered to clinicians at the point of care.

The initial focus of POC Advisor is on helping reduce deaths from and costs associated with sepsis—the single most expensive condition in U.S. hospitals. Each year approximately 1.6 million patients are diagnosed with and 258,000 die from sepsis, which carries an annual treatment price tag of $20 billion. It is a broad problem that requires system-wide change management, concurrent electronic surveillance, clinical decision support and data analytics.

“Identifying and implementing a highly effective approach to lessen sepsis severity and lower mortality rates is a significant aspect of our long-term quality improvement strategy,” said Joycelyn Craighead, Director of Quality, Huntsville Hospital, a 941-bed hospital in Alabama that is an early POC Advisor adopter and pilot site for the sepsis program. “By marrying surveillance and clinical decision support with workflow and procedural changes, POC Advisor offers a clinician-friendly, multi-tiered solution to the sepsis challenge. Most importantly, because it is supported by trusted medical evidence and proven change management and designed to minimize alert fatigue, we were confident that our clinicians would embrace this innovative approach.”

To battle sepsis, POC Advisor brings together:

• Electronic surveillance and sensitive and specific alerts accounting for both medical conditions and medications to enable closer coordination of care activities and rapid delivery of comprehensive patient information to clinicians at the point of care.
• Evidence based treatment protocols for the severely septic patient that are supported by the trusted suite of clinical decision support products from Wolters Kluwer Health, including UpToDate^®, Sentri7^®, ProVation^® Medical and Lexicomp^®.
• Automatic analysis of comprehensive data, including provider-level compliance with Early Goal-Directed Therapy protocols, to create the foundation for targeted and immediate response when conditions exist that have the potential to worsen a patient’s outcome.
• Change management activities such as provider education and screening tool and protocol development supported by The Altos Group, which was recognized by AHRQ for its efforts that successfully reduced the sepsis mortality rate at nine California hospitals by 55%.

The first pilot site, a top-tier community hospital in Northern California, has already provided an early demonstration of the platform’s efficacy. Preliminary data show that, in just three months, POC Advisor yielded significant improvements in key sepsis process measures. These include an 80% compliance rate in patient screening protocols; a 90% rate ordering lactate tests on those patients who met criteria; and a 75% rate initiating Early Goal-Directed Therapy for those patients who met criteria.

“The rapid improvement in sepsis protocol compliance realized by early adopters of POC Advisor will translate into an almost immediate return-on-investment by accelerating appropriate treatment, lessening the severity and therefore the cost of caring for septic patients,” said Arvind Subramanian, President and CEO, Wolters Kluwer Health, Clinical Solutions. “An innovative and integrated multi-disciplinary approach, POC Advisor works because it alerts when non-compliant activities occur. It helps reduce time lags between elements of care while avoiding the specter of alert fatigue that can impact effectiveness and adoption of decision support by clinicians on the front lines.”

Hospitals can learn more about POC Advisor by visiting Booth #1346 during HIMSS14 or contacting Andy Strunk, Innovation Lab Program Director, at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

About Wolters Kluwer Health

Wolters Kluwer Health is a leading global provider of information, business intelligence and point-of-care solutions for the healthcare industry. Serving more than 150 countries and territories worldwide, Wolters Kluwer Health’s customers include professionals, institutions and students in medicine, nursing, allied health and pharmacy. Major brands include Health Language^®, Lexicomp^®, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Medicom^®, Medknow, Ovid^®, Pharmacy OneSource^®, ProVation^® Medical and UpToDate^®.

Wolters Kluwer Health is part of Wolters Kluwer, a market-leading global information services company. Wolters Kluwer had 2012 annual revenues of €3.6 billion ($4.6 billion), employs approximately 19,000 people worldwide, and maintains operations in over 40 countries across Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. Follow our official Twitter handle: @WKHealth.