What You Should Know
- Wolters Kluwer Health has collaborated with Epic to offer an integrated suite combining UpToDate Lexidrug, Medi-Span, and UpToDate Patient Education directly within Epic EHR workflows.
- The combined offering targets safety-net institutions facing budget and resource constraints, including rural hospitals, Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), state hospitals, tribal healthcare organizations, and small ambulatory practices.
- The integrated bundle consolidates three distinct clinical decision support and medication safety tools into a single procurement, implementation, and support model.
- Native integration within Epic eliminates traditional standalone software testing and validation demands, reducing workload for internal clinical informatics and IT teams.
- The simplified procurement framework creates a single cost center for medication intelligence, evidence-based decision support, and patient education resources.
Wolters Kluwer and Epic Unify Clinical Decision Support for Underserved Health Systems
Rural hospitals, Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), tribal healthcare providers, and community health systems frequently encounter substantial financial and administrative barriers when attempting to procure and deploy top-tier clinical decision support (CDS) platforms. While large academic medical centers routinely integrate complex, multi-vendor clinical intelligence tools into their electronic health records (EHR), smaller institutions are often constrained by fragmented vendor contracts, separate cost centers, and limited internal IT capacity to validate standalone third-party software.
To eliminate procurement friction and accelerate time-to-value for safety-net providers, Wolters Kluwer Health has partnered with Epic to offer a unified clinical content solution. By packaging UpToDate Lexidrug, Medi-Span, and UpToDate Patient Education into a single, pre-validated offering within Epic workflows, the collaboration provides resource-constrained healthcare organizations streamlined access to enterprise-grade clinical decision support.
The unified offering integrates three core Wolters Kluwer health solutions directly into Epic’s native user interface:
- UpToDate Lexidrug (Referential Drug Support): Delivers actionable, evidence-based drug referential content and clinical consult guides directly within ordering workflows to guide prescribing, dosing, and administration decisions.
- Medi-Span (Embedded Medication Safety Data): Functions as the underlying medication data backbone, screening orders in real time for drug-drug interactions, dose range appropriateness, and duplicate therapy alerts to prevent adverse drug events.
- UpToDate Patient Education: Provides individualized, multi-lingual patient leaflets and discharge instructions to drive medication adherence and support care transitions.
- Pre-Validated Epic Workflows: Because the solutions operate natively within existing Epic environments, safety-net institutions bypass extensive local IT testing, validation cycles, and ongoing maintenance overhead.
“Healthcare organizations serving rural and underserved populations need access to the same evidence-based resources used across the broader healthcare ecosystem, but often face significant financial and operational barriers,” stated Yaw Fellin, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Clinical Decision Support and Provider Solutions at Wolters Kluwer Health. “The result is faster onboarding, reduced administrative complexity and a single cost center for trusted solutions.”
