LOS ANGELES -- Vanderbilt Medical Center, a world leader in medical informatics and recognized by US News & World Report as a top-ranked academic medical center, has joined with Zynx Health, the world leader in evidence-based healthcare, to improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of its patient care through adoption of Zynx Health's Executable Knowledge(R) Manager (EKM).

Vanderbilt Medical Center is a pioneer in the development of computerized provider order entry (CPOE) systems and the use of technology and informatics to improve patient care at the bedside. Zynx Health's EKM is an advanced internet-based tool for developing and maintaining evidence-based order sets, rules, and alerts for use in clinical decision support. EKM is a clinical solution of superior quality and depth, using the most rigorous editorial methodology to put the latest research directly into clinicians' hands. Vanderbilt Medical Center will use EKM to help its clinical order set development teams review relevant evidence as the teams decide on appropriate elements to include in each order set. The development teams will also use EKM to alert order set authors to new evidence that might require updating of existing order sets.

"For the past year, we have been systematically reviewing the evidence base of our highest volume inpatient pathways and the order sets used to translate those pathways into action," says Dr. William Stead, Associate Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs, Chief Information Officer and Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. "We have piloted the use of EKM during that process and found significant saving of clinical time during the order set development process. We are looking forward to working with the Zynx team to figure out how to best integrate their source of current evidence with the myriad types of information needed for care planning and robust clinical decision support."

"We are very excited about our relationship with Vanderbilt Medical Center," says Scott Weingarten, MD MPH, president and chief executive officer of Zynx Health. "Vanderbilt is a world class clinical, research, and teaching university hospital, and has developed one of the most prestigious and accomplished biomedical informatics departments in the world. We have tremendous respect for Vanderbilt's leadership position in this field and we are honored that Vanderbilt has selected Zynx Health to provide clinical decision support and order set management for its systems. We look forward to working with Vanderbilt's clinicians and biomedical informatics experts to improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of health care at Vanderbilt Medical Center."

Vanderbilt Medical Center joins more than 800 hospitals that use evidence based research and decision support from Zynx Health. Vanderbilt has used EKM for the order sets related to 25 of its inpatient pathways and plans to integrate the EKM into many domains within the medical center, including medicine, surgery, pediatrics, psychiatry, and women's health, among others. About Zynx Health

Zynx Health, a subsidiary of The Hearst Corporation, is the world's leading provider of evidence-based clinical decision support- customized and integrated into electronic order entry and record systems, and online in referential format. Zynx Health's team of physicians, nurses, and pharmacists develop clinical recommendations and guidelines of superior quality and depth based on a rigorous, clearly defined, and published research methodology. Zynx Health clinical decision support solutions support quality improvement efforts, major regulatory initiatives, and pay-for-performance incentive programs (e.g., the CMS-Premier demonstration project). These solutions are improving the quality of patient care in more than 800 hospitals across the country including independent community hospitals, academic institutions, and multi-hospital systems. For more information about Zynx Health, visit www.zynx.com or call (888)333.ZYNX.