As population grows and costs increase, doctors spend less time with each patient than ever. So it seems obvious that there needs to be faster access to relevant, trustworthy clinical information at the doctor-patient interface.
Healthline Networks, a fast-growing health information services provider, just announced that Elsevier, the world’s leading health publisher, uses Healthline’s semantic search platform for the Elsevier Merged Medical Taxonomy (EMMeT).
The company also worked closely with Healthline to develop the underlying technology for their new product, ClinicalKey. ClinicalKey is Elsevier’s new clinical search engine intended for use by the medical community.
Speaking about the new clinical key product, Michael Hansen, Elsevier CEO, said, “When Elsevier canvassed the health IT industry for the best search and informatics capabilities for our next-generation clinical decision support platform – starting with ClinicalKey – we selected Healthline for the unique strength of its semantic technology. Elsevier has built ClinicalKey based on our vast collections of medical content tagged, indexed and organized by our proprietary taxonomy platform to enable smarter search and faster answers for clinical professionals.”
Elsevier maintains libraries of medical resources, which include more than 700 textbooks, 400 journals covering all medical and surgical specialties, plus almost 10,000 surgical procedure videos.
Mr Hansen says Healthline’s semantic search engine understands the medical terms in this content repository. It can even identify synonyms and medical codes related to these terms. The company will constantly update their new search platform to reflect new clinical terminology, consumer synonyms, drug and treatment options and clinical findings. They retain a team of medical professionals and information specialists.
The aim is to have this technology returning the most relevant information, acting as a decision support system. It will even return material often missed by other search engines because of it’s enhanced abilities.
Elsevier decided on Healthline’s semantic search platform because of its superior clinical information recall and precision.
Hansen says his company’s offering is head and shoulders above all other products in this area. It has the power of recall and also search precision.
recall: the ability to connect all relevant documents to a given medical query
search precision: the algorithmic refinement and ranking of each document
West Shell III, CEO and chairman of Healthline Networks said, “In addition to our many large consumer-oriented partners in health insurance and health media, the use of our semantic technology by Elsevier underscores that Healthline’s core platform scales to address the most clinically rigorous decision-support requirements.”
Speaking about the breadth of Healthline’s taxonomy, Mr. Shell said “The taxomony sits on top of the world’s largest collection of medical content. That gives our technology a deep understanding of medical terms that enables Elsevier to deliver the most robust, timely, relevant and medically accurate information available today.”
“Healthline is always striving for ways to apply the most current and sophisticated technology to improve healthcare decision making – traditionally for millions of consumers, but now, through Elsevier’s ClinicalKey, it’s extended to healthcare professionals around the world,” said Dr. Paul Auerbach, Healthline’s Chief Medical Officer, Stanford University professor of surgery and emergency medicine, and author of Wilderness Medicine.
