Making Medical Knowledge Accessible: Simplifying Healthcare Information for Better Patient Care: Healthcare is complex enough, finding the knowledge you need shouldn’t be.
In a world where information is available at the click of a button, why do healthcare professionals struggle to access the medical knowledge they need at the point of care?
A multitude of disparate systems, user experiences, and red tape make access to this information a minefield. Healthcare professionals are time-poor, and their priorities lie in patient care, not spending hours trawling through the local intranet or, worse, Google, looking for the local guidelines for a particular treatment pathway or the details for a specific drug regimen.
The launch of large language model-powered chatbots, such as ChatGPT, has offered an alternative source of clinical information. Yet this information is, by its admission, not guaranteed to be accurate and, therefore, still relies on the user to determine accuracy. A recent survey of GPs in the UK, conducted by the BMJ*1, sought to determine the use of Chatbots in clinical practice. 20% of those who responded admitted using ‘generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools’. Whilst the sample size was very small (under 2% of the total number of GPs in the UK*2), it still highlights that access to medical knowledge at the point of care needs to be better and more reliable.
The lack of easy-to-access clinical guidance was the challenge facing Dr Declan Kelly when he was working as an emergency medicine doctor in Belfast. Treating patients without being able to have the information needed to support their diagnosis at hand led Dr Kelly to utilise his software development skills to come up with a solution. He started building a platform that indexed and organised clinical content, to streamline access to medical knowledge. As the platform grew, it quickly became apparent that it was having a positive impact on Dr Kelly and his colleagues. It was then he realised that more time and investment were needed. Eolas Medical was born.
A free-to-use resource for individual healthcare professionals, Eolas Medical is a knowledge management platform that enables instant access to information at the point of care. The platform is used by NHS Trusts, clinical teams and individuals to support the delivery of patient care by consolidating and organising medical knowledge from trusted sources into a simple, easy-to-use platform, providing all users with confidence to provide the safest care possible. Utilising an API, the content is permanently linked to the originating source, ensuring it remains up to date.
Move forward five years and Eolas Medical is now in 80% of NHS Trusts, as well as leading centres in the US, including Stanford and Mass General. They have seen a 300% increase in monthly average users in the last 12 months and acquired the antimicrobial resource app MicroGuide earlier in 2024. And they aren’t stopping there. With ambitious plans for expanding the platform, Eolas Medical is fast becoming the leading source of medical knowledge for healthcare professionals worldwide.
To learn more about how Eolas Medical could support you, your team or your hospital, download the app or sign in to the desktop platform: www.eolasmedical.com/get-the-app.
Better knowledge, safer care.
*1 https://informatics.bmj.com/content/31/1/e101102
*2 https://www.statista.com/statistics/462235/general-practitioners-employment-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/
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