Waltham, MA - On the heals of an imminent 60 Minutes documentary exposing the inner workings of UpToDate®, the popular subscription-only, physician-authored clinical decision support resource, officials were forced to admit most of their authors use Google as their goto resource.
In a prepared statement to reporters, Wolters Kluwer Health, which owns UpToDate, confirmed that Google is hands down the most popular resource used by their 6,000 physician authors to regurgitate medical information into neatly repackaged articles for the $500 per year professional service.
"I don't even know why this is news. Everyone knows doctors have been using Google for years to get their trusted medical information like the rest of us, said CEO Nancy McKinstry.
"As little as 20 years ago, our physicians would have had to go to a library and ask a librarian to find peer reviewed articles, but nobody has time for that anymore. The use of Google is just a natural extension of the internet revolution."
UpToDate says they actually encourage their authors to use lay people resources to fine tine their articles for the current patient-satisfaction-centered model of care. "We know patients are using Google to find their trusted information. It just makes sense for our authors to use Google too so our users don't find themselves in the uncomfortable situation of questioning the accuracy of Google with their patients," said Nancy.
In fact, just last week UpToDate stopped hosting all images on their servers and instead link directly to Google images to help physicians see hundreds, sometimes thousands of examples for any given condition.
"Our goal is to have Google and UpToDate coexist in a perfect symbiotic relationship where doctors feel good about using our service instead of Google and patients feel comfortable their physicians aren't dumber than Google," said Nancy.
"In my article on performing lap appys, I linked to a 2007 YouTube video with over 2 million views I found by typing lap appy videos into the Google search engine. And I even included recommendations on post-operative care from an online forum by a guy who calls himself Knot-A-Surgeon."
The revelations have left many physicians angry at paying $500 a year for information they can get free from Google. But those emotions quickly subsided after realizing they can earn hundreds of hours of continuing medical education credits everyday just by looking things up. "I used UpToDate the other day to try and find some information on routine hypertension management and earned 60 hours of qualifying CME in just 30 minutes," said Dr Elaine
Fenwick, a Kentucky Hospitalist who's state license totally coincidentally requires 60 CME to be renewed next week.
Recent research confirms the lack of patient mortality difference between physicians preferentially using Google over UpToDate as their research choice. However, one subset of patients did suggest physicians with prolific Wikipedia experience may actually have a slight survival benefit.
"The data is intriguing and we may have to gently nudge our authors to lean more heavily on Wikipedia than we have in the past," said Nancy, who also notes a 78% increase in patients printing Wikipedia articles to show their doctors.
The close relationship between Google and UpToDate has some financial speculators suggesting Google my purchase UpToDate and change its name to GoogleCME®.
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In a prepared statement to reporters, Wolters Kluwer Health, which owns UpToDate, confirmed that Google is hands down the most popular resource used by their 6,000 physician authors to regurgitate medical information into neatly repackaged articles for the $500 per year professional service.
"I don't even know why this is news. Everyone knows doctors have been using Google for years to get their trusted medical information like the rest of us, said CEO Nancy McKinstry.
"As little as 20 years ago, our physicians would have had to go to a library and ask a librarian to find peer reviewed articles, but nobody has time for that anymore. The use of Google is just a natural extension of the internet revolution."
UpToDate says they actually encourage their authors to use lay people resources to fine tine their articles for the current patient-satisfaction-centered model of care. "We know patients are using Google to find their trusted information. It just makes sense for our authors to use Google too so our users don't find themselves in the uncomfortable situation of questioning the accuracy of Google with their patients," said Nancy.
In fact, just last week UpToDate stopped hosting all images on their servers and instead link directly to Google images to help physicians see hundreds, sometimes thousands of examples for any given condition.
"Our goal is to have Google and UpToDate coexist in a perfect symbiotic relationship where doctors feel good about using our service instead of Google and patients feel comfortable their physicians aren't dumber than Google," said Nancy.
Dr. Franklin Bennington, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and prolific UpToDate author of more than 500 articles says he has no problem using Google to keep physicians abreast on best practices.
"In my article on performing lap appys, I linked to a 2007 YouTube video with over 2 million views I found by typing lap appy videos into the Google search engine. And I even included recommendations on post-operative care from an online forum by a guy who calls himself Knot-A-Surgeon."
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| It turns out Google and UpToDate are pretty much the same thing. |
Fenwick, a Kentucky Hospitalist who's state license totally coincidentally requires 60 CME to be renewed next week.
Recent research confirms the lack of patient mortality difference between physicians preferentially using Google over UpToDate as their research choice. However, one subset of patients did suggest physicians with prolific Wikipedia experience may actually have a slight survival benefit.
"The data is intriguing and we may have to gently nudge our authors to lean more heavily on Wikipedia than we have in the past," said Nancy, who also notes a 78% increase in patients printing Wikipedia articles to show their doctors.
The close relationship between Google and UpToDate has some financial speculators suggesting Google my purchase UpToDate and change its name to GoogleCME®.
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