Steward Health Care, the biggest private hospital chain in the country, is turning to technology from Wolters Kluwer to help tackle variations in care across more than three-dozen hospitals.

The integrated care network, which spans 10 states and 38 hospitals, is expected to care for some 3 million patients this year. To drive quality and safety improvements nationwide, the health system is enlisting an array of clinical decision support tools from Wolters Kluwer to help standardize evidence-based practices across care settings.

The goal is to better integrate CDS and real-time surveillance technology into the workflows of doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, officials said, while also offering tools to help patients shape the way their care is delivered.

"As a fast-growing organization, we are focused on ensuring patients benefit from the best possible standards of care at every Steward hospital," said Joseph Weinstein, MD, Steward's chief medical officer.

The new tools will help ensure that Steward's clinicians are relying on the "most current, evidence-based knowledge and technology that is optimized for their unique workflows," he said. "Across our widespread population, our patients are safer as we implement tools to detect infections more quickly and accurately."

Wolters Kluwer Health technology will help physicians, nurses and medical staff across the sprawling health system improve quality and outcomes with several different technologies, deployed alongside Steward's existing UpToDate decision support platform.

Evidence-based software from Wolters Kluwer's Lippincott division, will help with point-of-care decision support, continuing education and more.

The Ovid platform will enable easier access to some 100 million health, biomedical and pharmaceutical journals, books and multimedia resources.

The Sentri7 clinical surveillance platform offers real-time insights into patient population, to help   detect and treat infections and hospital-acquired conditions more quickly.

Diana Nole, CEO at Wolters Kluwer Health said the company aims to help Steward implement a "system-wide strategy for standardizing higher quality care and increased patient safety with resources that span Steward’s far-reaching continuum of care."

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