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CHC doctors now equipped with Web-based resource
The Commonwealth Health Center obtained access yesterday to an evidence-based, physician-authored, clinical decision support resource used globally known as UpToDate to enhance the public hospital’s ability to provide healthcare to residents.
The Web-based product is subscribed to annually, with prices Commonwealth Healthcare Center CEO Esther Muna declined to disclose.
Muna said that CHC physicians and healthcare providers have exclusive access to the program because it is set to the hospital’s IP address.
“It’s basically something that we want to try to support our doctors. Only physicians and healthcare providers that are working for us have access to it. In other words, you cannot log in from somewhere else even if you know the log-in information. This is because we gave the servers our IP address so that it can only be accessed by us, because we’re paying for it,” said Muna.
David S. Grauman, a doctor of internal medicine at CHC, said that the hospital’s investment comes in handy, not only because he has been using it for 20 to 25 years, but because of the constant changes in the world of medicine since his graduation.
“I use it many times a day. There were many things that I was taught in school that has changed a lot. I thought I still knew the answer, how to do things, and when I started looking up what the world experts think we should do based on evidence-based medicine, I was wrong,” he said.
Grauman has been practicing internal medicine since 1972 and has been in CHC for two years.
“When you start looking that up instead of what you kind of remember from being in school years ago, it’s amazing how things change. When things change, we have to keep looking it up,” he added.
The Web-based database has been well received since being online at CHC and includes a multitude of medical information such as evidence-based medical content, summaries and treatment recommendations of various specialties, updates in practice, medical calculators, a drug database, and over 400,000 references with links to full text articles.
