Dear Clinician,

Our mission at UpToDate is to improve medical care. One way we see care being improved is through the use of information therapy to support shared medical decision making.

Information therapy is defined as "the prescription of targeted, evidence-based medical information to meet the specific needs of a patient, caregiver, or consumer as part of their process of care."

Research demonstrates that information therapy allows patients to:

• Ask better questions of their doctors concerning their health and their illness
• Have a better understanding of the answers they do receive
• Form realistic expectations
• Become more confident in their ability to manage their illness or condition to achieve better health
• Participate more actively in the treatment and decision-making processes¹

Interviews with our clinician subscribers who use our patient information with their patients support these findings. Clinicians tell us that when they use UpToDate with patients the quality of care is improved, office visits become more efficient and patient satisfaction is increased.

But shared medical decision making can only happen when both patients and their health care providers have access to the same set of evidence-based medical information. That is why we developed UpToDate for Patients, a free web site where patients can access hundreds of current, in-depth and unbiased patient information topics written by UpToDate authors and editors. Like our professional site, our patient site has no advertising or commercial support so you can be sure that the information your patients are reading is completely unbiased. Patients who want more in-depth information can subscribe for a week or a month to access our professional-level information.

I encourage you to share UpToDate with your patients by printing or emailing a topic, writing an information prescription or adding a search widget to your web site. Your patients are going to be searching the internet for medical information anyway. Why not share with them the resource you already trust?

Sincerely,

Denise Basow, MD
Editor-in-Chief, UpToDate