Saudi Arabia’s medical education sector has marked a significant milestone in clinical knowledge access, with the Saudi Digital Library (SDL) and Wolters Kluwer Health partnership achieving unprecedented usage rates for the UpToDate clinical decision support tool. In its first year, the collaboration has reached 37 medical colleges across the Kingdom, establishing new benchmarks for medical resource utilisation in the Gulf region.
The implementation has witnessed remarkable engagement, with SDL recording the highest usage across the Gulf Cooperation Council and Middle East region, achieving more than 180,000 topic views monthly. The mobile application has proven particularly successful, accounting for 65% of total platform usage, indicating a strong preference for portable access to clinical information among healthcare professionals and students.
Focus on pharmaceutical knowledge shows clinical priorities
Analysis of user behaviour reveals that medication-related content has emerged as the most frequently accessed resource, with nearly 500,000 drug information topic views recorded. This pattern suggests a substantial demand for pharmaceutical knowledge among Saudi Arabia’s medical community and highlights the importance of readily available, evidence-based drug information in clinical education and practice.
The partnership has also contributed significantly to continuing medical education, with healthcare professionals and students accumulating more than 321,000 CME credit hours over the past 12 months. This achievement underscores the platform’s role in supporting ongoing professional development within the Saudi medical sector.
Dr Sulaiman Ibrahim Alriyaee, General Director of the Saudi Digital Library, emphasised the partnership’s alignment with national educational objectives: “Our partnership aims to achieve a promising future for those in the educational healthcare sectors in Saudi Arabia. As we enter the second year of providing services to all educational institutions in the Kingdom, I urge our team to ensure this valuable platform reaches all beneficiaries.”
Looking towards expansion, Garry Edwards, Clinical Effectiveness Vice President for EMEA at Wolters Kluwer Health, outlined future directions: “Our mission is to help prepare future physicians with best-in-class evidence-based practice, driving change in their hospital roles. Given SDL’s extensive reach across universities and university hospitals, we aim to expand our scope to include all university hospitals in the Kingdom.”
