Clinical decision support tools

Clinical Decision Support tools are reference resources designed to support clinical decision-making. Health care professionals utilise these tools to quickly lookup information concerning diagnostic and treatment guidance at the point-of-care with a patient.

Clinical Decision Support tools contain detailed summaries of a wide range of conditions and interventions, supported by synthesized and evaluated evidence-based research and/or peer-reviewed sources. Summaries are curated by health professionals and regularly updated to reflect new evidence. Summaries can include levels of evidence, rating scales or grade recommendations as well as citations back to the original research studies, systematic reviews, or guidelines.

BMJ Best Practice is a clinical decision support tool, uniquely structured around the patient consultation, with advice on symptom evaluation, tests to order and treatment approach. Access to BMJ Best Practice is provided by Health Education England to all NHS staff in England.

Features:

• summaries on 1000 conditions across 32 specialties, 11,000 differential diagnosis, 7000+ guidelines
• prioritized updates as follows: drug withdrawals or changes that may affect patient safety within 24-48 hours; evidence that changes practice within one month; evidence that confirms current practice within three months.
• monitors over 5000 journals
• drug information via the BNF & BNFc
• 500+ medical calculators
• Accredited for CME/CPD activities and learning are tracked. Accredited by the RCGP and other institutions
• Patient leaflets
• Incorporates Cochrane Clinical Answers
• EBM Toolkit with checklists and tools to support evaluating studies

• NEW! The Comorbidities tool is the only point of care tool that supports the management of the whole patient by including guidance on the treatment of a patient's acute condition alongside their pre-existing comorbidities. 

For access go to the BMJ Best Practice website using your OpenAthens username and password. If you are a new user, you will need to now register for a BMJ Best Practice personal account. Personal accounts allow you to track CME/CPD activity and to log in to the BMJ Best Practice app using your personal account credentials. This is a quick one-off registration that will link your two accounts together and going forward you can then use your personal account to log in directly to BMJ Best Practice website and app.

DynaMed provides clinically-organised summaries for over 11,700 topics, incorporating over 1,000 drug topics. DynaMed editors monitor the content of over 500 medical journals, using a rigorous seven-step methodology for selecting and critically appraising each selected article. The tool is updated daily, making it the most current point of care tool on the market. Over 22,000 global guidelines including those from NICE, SIGN and Royal Colleges.

Features:

• Monitors 250 medical journals and 200 guideline organizations across 28 specialties
• As soon as new evidence is evaluated using the six steps governing systematic processing, it is integrated into the appropriate topic(s)
• Recommendations are developed using the internationally-accepted Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) system
• Utilizes a three level evidence reliability rating
• Clinicians’ Practice Points provides guidance and opinion from their expert physician editors
• To access content remotely and via the app create a personal account.

UpToDate is a time saving, evidence-based, clinical decision at point of care, support tool. It contains all of the internal medicine sub-specialties (at a level that meets the needs of the sub specialist), primary care, internal medicine, ob/gyn,paediatrics, general surgery, and more – all in one resource. To access UpToDate users are required to create an authenticated personal account, this can only be done whilst logged onto the Barts Health trust network.

Once a personal account has been created users can then access UpToDate from any location and can also download and access the app version. UpToDate personal accounts must be re-authenticated every 90 days to ensure continued access and this must be done whilst logged onto the Barts Health trust network. We recommend that users do not try to access UpToDate using OpenAthens, due to conflicts between OpenAthens and Personal account access.

UpToDate Lexidrug (formally Lexicomp) is a drugs information database that will tell you everything you need to know about a certain drug. It also includes a drug interaction feature so you know what to be aware of when prescribing. Access is via IP if you are on Barts Health sites or OpenAthens elsewhere. Access to the Lexicomp app is available to Barts users, please visit the trust intranet site for download instructions and authorisation code