Wolters Kluwer Health, Laerdal Medical announce product and distribution alliance

Laerdal Medical and Wolters Kluwer Health announced today a product and distribution alliance that will transform healthcare education.  The "Learning for Saving Lives" alliance will initially target undergraduate programs of nursing, medicine and the health professions, and will seamlessly integrate curriculum offerings from Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW), part of Wolters Kluwer Health, with simulated patient case solutions from Laerdal.

Simulation labs are now an integral part of the healthcare learning curriculum and supplement the clinical hours that students spend training in hospitals.  However, integrating Sim Lab training into the curriculum has been a challenge for faculty, and valuable and expensive simulation equipment is often underutilized. The "Learning for Saving Lives" alliance will change that.

The first alliance offering, which will be introduced to the market this spring, will integrate DocuCare, a new Electronic Health Record (EHR) learning tool from LWW with Laerdal's suite of manikin simulation offerings.  As learners work with Laerdal patient scenarios, they will be able to record their patient directly into the DocuCare EHR.   The ability to compare actions through the manikin tracking log with the EHR documentation log will provide a powerful debriefing tool— so students fully master the skills of patient record interpretation, patient care, and follow up documentation.  The integrated product will be linked to resources from LWW's textbook, reference and eLearning content, to improve clinical knowledge and judgment and create engaging experiences for today's learners. 

"We understand that for healthcare learners, no amount of didactic learning can replace actual practice with patients," says Susan Driscoll, President & CEO of Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, the Professional and Education unit of Wolters Kluwer Health.  "By integrating our didactic content with Laerdal simulations, we can bring 'practice' into the classroom to give students invaluable hands-on learning that will result in a more clinically-prepared workforce."

Practicing with manikin simulations in Sim Labs is an essential component of healthcare learning today, but scheduling lab time – and cycling students through clinical rotations - can be a challenge for faculty.  Because Laerdal and Wolters Kluwer Health believe that simulated patient practice should be available to both students and practitioners anywhere, anytime, the two organizations will also partner to create and deliver the largest and most complete collection of computer-based patient case scenarios, known as healthcare micro-simulations, available. These computer scenarios will replicate the acute-care scenarios that are common in Sim Labs, and will supplement those with chronic-care scenarios to provide a complete range of clinical practice situations.  The first set of computer scenarios will be available for use in fall of 2012.

"Educators have long been requesting the integration of simulation and classroom content," says Clive Patrickson, Global Vice President at Laerdal Medical," and when combined with PC based simulations and LWW's DocuCare EHR system, they will have new power to transform healthcare education in their hands.  This way, we believe that the alliance will greatly enhance learning to help save lives."