[April 24, 2012]

Healthline's Semantic Search Platform Powers Elsevier's ClinicalKey, a Next-Generation Reference Tool for Physicians

In an era where physicians have less time to spend with patients than ever before, it's essential to have rapid access to relevant, trustworthy clinical information at the point-of-care. Healthline Networks, one of the fastest-growing providers of health information services, today announced that Elsevier, the world's leading health publisher, is utilizing Healthline's semantic search platform to form the foundation of the Elsevier Merged Medical Taxonomy (EMMeT), and worked closely with Healthline to develop the underlying technology for ClinicalKey, Elsevier's new clinical search engine for the medical community.

"When Elsevier canvassed the health IT industry for the best search and informatics capabilities for our next-generation clinical decision support platform - starting with ClinicalKey - we selected Healthline for the unique strength of its semantic technology," said Michael Hansen, CEO of Elsevier. "Elsevier has built ClinicalKey based on our vast collections of medical content tagged, indexed and organized by our proprietary taxonomy platform to enable smarter search and faster answers for clinical professionals."

Elsevier's libraries of medical resources include more than 700 textbooks, 400 top journals covering every medical and surgical specialty, and 9,000 videos of surgical procedures. Healthline's semantic search engine understands - at a precise linical level - the medical terms in this vast array of content and identifies synonyms and medical codes related to these terms. The search platform is constantly updated to reflect new clinical terminology, consumer synonyms, drug and treatment options and clinical findings by a team of medical professionals and informatics specialists. As a result, when clinicians search a medical term, this technology returns or recalls the most relevant information and decision support, including material often missed by other search engines.

Elsevier selected Healthline's semantic search platform due to the technology's superior clinical information recall and precision, both critical to delivering the most effective decision support. The power of recall (the ability to connect all relevant documents to a given medical query), combined with search precision (the algorithmic refinement and ranking of each document), is what sets the Healthline offering apart.

"In addition to our many large consumer-oriented partners in health insurance and health media, the use of our semantic technology by Elsevier underscores that Healthline's core platform scales to address the most clinically rigorous decision-support requirements," said West Shell III, CEO and chairman of Healthline Networks. "The breadth of this taxonomy, which sits atop the world's largest collection of medical content, brings a deep understanding of medical terms that enables Elsevier to deliver the most robust, timely, relevant and medically accurate information available today."

Also of note is the ability for ClinicalKey users to effortlessly and efficiently share query results with colleagues and patients at the point of care.

"Healthline is always striving for ways to apply the most current and sophisticated technology to improve healthcare decision making - traditionally for millions of consumers, but now, through Elsevier's ClinicalKey, it's extended to healthcare professionals around the world," said Dr. Paul Auerbach, Healthline's Chief Medical Officer, Stanford University professor of surgery and emergency medicine, and author of Wilderness Medicine. "Providing physicians with access to reliable, relevant clinical information from trustworthy sources is just one way Healthline's technology can be used to improve communication between doctors and patients."

About Healthline Networks

Healthline Networks is one of the fastest growing providers of intelligent health information services, enabling consumers and providers to make more confident, informed healthcare decisions. The company's proprietary semantic healthcare taxonomy, the largest of its kind, powers a suite of intelligent health search, content and advertising services. Combining advanced search technology with deep medical expertise, Healthline partners with a network of trusted destination sites that include publishers, portals, search engines, employers and health plans. Headquartered in San Francisco and named to Deloitte's (News - Alert) Technology Fast 500 in 2010 and 2011, Healthline is backed by Aetna, Comcast Ventures, GE, Investor Growth Capital, Kaiser Permanente, Reed Elsevier, U.S. News & World Report, and VantagePoint Capital Partners. For more information, visit http://www.healthlinenetworks.net.

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