UpToDate is a wildly used medical resource app. Its somewhere in the top 5, many medical organizations use it for their staff. I think Kaiser uses it. The general press says there are about 2 million active users. I’ve wanted to take it for a spin for a while and a took a look this week. I have a working thread on Pulse Oximetry with a few organizations including the American Lung Association (who of course have been very helpful, polite, responsive etc.) The person there also mentioned UpToDate as a good reference point. I checked out their article on Pulse Oximetry and found a number of very old references some going back 20 or even 30 years (PMID 2024749; https://www.uptodate.com/contents/pulse-oximetry/abstract/20) for example). A lot has changed in that timeframe.
This did not give me a warm and fussy feeling, although I plan to continue to use the tool for at least a few months. I like to check a websites news or blog to see how healthy they are. On the News and Events tab, the featured articles (there was only one) was from the CEO Diana Nole from 2018. Now, that’s truly a bit out-of-date and in May of last year she moved to Nuance. I next clicked on the Event Schedule which I would have assumed would have been published sometime in the last quarter of 2020 and it was blank. It had a statement “The 2020 Event Schedule is Coming Soon”. I assume this was posted sometime in 2019 (Pre COVID) and remained blank into the start of 2020. Once Covid arrived all bets were off, but it clearly seems they had nothing planned or posted before Covid arrived. They could of course just added all events are withdrawn due to Covid and will be posted when conditions change. But there’s nothing.
As a company whos entire model is based on keeping current on medical information and their very name speaks to this foundation, this is an epic fail. Hopefully, their curated medical references do much better, but I would proceed with caution.
