Tackling the infodemic: Part 2

The pandemic has caused an unprecedented amount of medical data, leading to ‘fake news’ and misinformation freely available online. Such false and unwanted information could put patients on the wrong diagnostic path, with inconsistent care and undesirable outcomes.

In The Dynamism of Clinical Knowledge, Dr. Ian Chuang, Chief Medical Officer, Elsevier, refers to a worldwide study that highlights just how many clinicians start their search journey by seeking out answers on free resources. Information freely available online is neither evidence-based nor updated and yet the answers found affect what is learned and decided.

As Ankur Walia, Senior Product Manager, Elsevier, comments, ‘The information is not trustworthy but referring to it has become a matter of habit. For 80-90% of doctors, their first instinct is to go to these free platforms. What they are doing is risky – for their patients and their reputation.’

Stopping misinformation takes the right tools and a trusted partner for finding the truth. Dr Chuang advocates the need for a high-quality knowledge base that should adhere to the Five Rights of Knowledge by providing the right information, for the right person, in the right format, through the right channel at the right time in the workflow.

Elsevier has therefore developed ClinicalKey Now to provide easily accessible, evidence–based information, enabling clinicians to make informed and accurate decisions about diagnosis and treatment in a rapidly evolving medical environment. A mobile-first solution, ClinicalKey Now has intuitive clinical algorithms and different depths of information. It not only reflects national and regional practice and follows global standards, but is also transparent in showing information sources and references.

Using ClinicalKey Now, clinicians can understand the ‘why’ as well as the ‘how’ and know it’s the absolute truth.

Elsevier has developed ClinicalKey Now to provide easily accessible, evidence–based information, enabling clinicians to make informed and accurate decisions about diagnosis and treatment in a rapidly evolving medical environment.