About UpToDate Patient Information

UpToDate provides hundreds of patient information topics, allowing healthcare providers and patients to share in the medical decision making process.

Goals and objectives

For healthcare providers, we aim to provide high-quality, current, evidence-based patient education materials that can be easily accessed and used with their patients at the point-of-care, enabling shared medical decision making.

For patients, we aim to provide a free and accessible web site with high-quality, current, evidence-based health information to answer medical questions and help make informed medical decisions. In addition, we offer patients the opportunity to subscribe to professional-level materials for a short term (one week or one month). This allows patients to read all of our in-depth topic reviews and share what they learn with their family or healthcare team.

About UpToDate patient information topics

Our patient information topics include an in-depth discussion of the risk factors, causes, diagnostic processes, preventive measures, complications, and recommended treatments for many of the most common conditions.

Our patient information topics offer:

• Integrated full color pictures, graphics and charts to help the reader understand difficult medical concepts
• Extensive referencing with links to article abstracts
• Links to other related topics and related search terms in UpToDate

Our patient information is written at a 12th grade reading level and may not be appropriate for all patients. See the "Where to get more information" section of each patient-level topic for other high-quality web sites that may be appropriate for patients at lower reading levels or for patients who do not read English.

Updating schedule and editorial review

Similar to our clinician-level materials, the patient information topics are updated every four months based upon the recent medical literature. All patient information topics are written and edited by our in-house nurse practitioner and physician editors and reviewed by an external physician author and section editor. Thus, our patient information is current, accurate and evidence-based.

Refer patients to our web site for more information

We encourage healthcare providers to refer patients to our web site for patients, www.uptodate.com/patients. On this site they can view all our patient education topics for free and/or subscribe to access the clinician-level content.

Link to us

Hospitals and clinical practices are welcome to link to any of our patient information materials. See our linking instructions.