DynaMedex – Keeping Pace with the Evolution of Clinical Decision Support

In 1995, DynaMed was founded by Dr. Brian Alper, MD, MSPH, FAAFP, FAMIA, as an evidence-based clinical reference tool with the mission to provide the most useful information to health care professionals at the point of care. Dr. Alper established systematic literature surveillance as a method to extend evidence-based medicine principles and applied to sustain continuous updating of DynaMed. In 2005, EBSCO acquired DynaMed and scaled it to employ hundreds of professionals and serve the needs of millions of physicians globally.

Today, DynaMedex has evolved and rapidly grown to support the growing needs of today’s clinicians. The team at DynaMedex, comprised of multiple medical writers, project managers, and more than 220 members of editorial, recently completed a multi-year initiative to expand the breadth and depth of its evidence-based disease and condition content, complemented by the addition of key advanced clinical decision resources.

This expanded offering gives clinicians access to the right tools and information they need to make the best-informed decisions at the point of care. The platform’s expert staff of clinicians and methodologists have worked to extend the solution’s coverage of more than 30 clinical specialties, while developing more extensive coverage of those topics to create a more comprehensive, clinician-centric point-of-care solution.

The expansion initiative, launched more than three years ago, incorporated feedback from clinicians to enhance DynaMedex’s point-of-care coverage and competitiveness. DynaMedex disease and condition content is designed to deliver the best available evidence, enhance the clinician-patient relationship, and streamline clinician workflows — to help drive better patient outcomes and an improved clinician experience.

As part of their effort to push the clinical decision support tool further along a path of innovation, the team of clinical experts at DynaMedex investigated how clinicians search for and use clinical information at the point-of-care. The insights they uncovered led to user interface changes that shorten the amount of time it takes to answer and act on clinical inquiries and allow increased user customization.

DynaMedex also presents evidence-based updates that are potentially practice-changing at the forefront of the user experience, helping ensure they won’t be missed. Designed to give clinicians access to the most comprehensive clinical decision support resources available to help improve real-world clinical outcomes, additional aspects that set DynaMedex apart include:

• 20,000+ evidence-based clinical recommendations, with daily updates
• Clear distinctions between evidence-based recommendations and
• expert opinions
• Bulleted, easy-to-read content formatted with today’s point-of-care realities in mind
• Rigorous editorial processes, characterized by continuous identification, selection, summarizing, synthesizing, and interpretation of the best available clinical evidence—with conclusions updated in a timely manner when new evidence emerges
• More than 30 clinical specialties, each categorized to align with how clinicians actually search for information
• Full access to Micromedex’s industry-leading drug and dosing resources, including specialty neonatal and pediatric content, and tools for drug interactions and IV compatibility
• Advanced decision support tools, including DynaMed Decisions, that facilitate efficient clinical decisions, informed patient decisions and effective shared decision-making.

These additional innovations move DynaMedex beyond the traditional approach to clinical reference offerings, integrating with the EHR to streamline the decision-making and documentation process:

• Isabel, a platform that generates possible differential diagnoses for clinicians based on their patients’ unique, potentially complex clinical presentations
• Direct, one-click access to primary literature sources embedded within the clinical content
• A rigorous conflict of interest policy that ensures content promotes improvements or quality in healthcare and not a specific proprietary business interest—all content is free of the control of companies defined by the ACCME as ineligible
• SMART on FHIR integration
• Mobile app access included with every subscription