McGraw-Hill Professional Launches ClinicalAccess, a Breakthrough Clinical Decision Support Tool for Physicians and Healthcare Professionals at the Point of Care

NEW YORK, Feb. 19, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- McGraw-Hill Professional today announced the release of ClinicalAccess, an online clinical decision support tool designed to help physicians in hospitals, clinics, and ambulatory care facilities worldwide find the most targeted answers to clinical questions at the point of care.

ClinicalAccess redefines the way healthcare professionals find answers by providing access to the world's largest collection of physician-answered questions across 25 specialties in internal medicine. This breakthrough clinical information service was developed by a team of specialty physician editors who drew upon their extensive experience and actual approach to patient care. The team created the 120,000-question database and curated the most relevant and accurate answer to virtually every important clinical question that arises in a patient/doctor encounter.

Optimized to provide the fastest and most-relevant answer to specific clinical questions, ClinicalAccess further supports healthcare practitioners by providing deep-dive linking to more than 150,000 pages of expert content, including 70,000 images, procedural videos, and animations. In addition to the clinical content from McGraw-Hill Professional's acclaimed AccessMedicine platforms and its world-renowned textbooks such as Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, Rudolph's Pediatrics, and Tintinalli's Emergency Medicine, the service also features new and up-to-date information to reflect changes in medicine. In addition, ClinicalAccess provides continuously updated references to the best health research from McMaster University Premium Literature Service (McMaster PLUS), one of the most-respected names in evidence-based medicine.

The unique search approach introduced by ClinicalAccess was developed in partnership with Silverchair Information Systems of Charlottesville, Virginia, and deployed on its powerful SCM6 platform. SCM6 enabled McGraw-Hill Professional's expert content to be semantically classified and targeted at a deeply granular level—individual paragraphs, figures, tables, algorithms, and video that contain a precise, specific answer to each clinical question. ClinicalAccess search incorporates Silverchair's Cortex biomedical ontology to connect user point-of-care terminology to targeted answers. SCM6 also provides a responsive interface to optimize user experience on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices.

"ClinicalAccess is truly an innovative clinical decision support tool. It immediately provides a precise and reliable answer, so I don't have to spend time sifting through many pages of text or click through several webpages to find the information that I need," said Anderson Spickard, III, MD, MS, FACP, Editor-in-Chief of ClinicalAccess, and Associate Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics and Assistant Dean of Education Informatics and Technology, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, TN.

ClinicalAccess builds on the success of McGraw-Hill Professional's Access subscription services which are used by almost every medical school in the United States and in many countries around the world.   The launch of ClinicalAccess represents an important contribution to solving the most pressing pain point in patient care – delivering specific and efficient answers to clinical questions at the point of care.

"ClinicalAccess addresses a need that has until now gone largely unmet in the field of medicine: the need for physicians and clinicians to quickly and accurately diagnose and treat in real time," said Philip Ruppel, president of McGraw-Hill Professional. "At McGraw-Hill, we use the highest-quality content and most innovative technology to put on-demand knowledge literally in the palms of our customers' hands."