Healthwise Incorporated

Healthwise Incorporated is a nonprofit organization founded in 1975 that provides clinical health content, patient education materials, and decision support tools rather than operating as an EMR/EHR vendor. The organization creates evidence-based health information content that is licensed and integrated into existing electronic health record systems, patient portals, and digital health platforms operated by hospitals, health systems, and actual EMR vendors.

Healthwise's core offering consists of its Healthwise Knowledgebase, which contains thousands of evidence-based health content topics covering conditions, treatments, medications, and preventive care. This content is designed to support shared decision-making between clinicians and patients and can be embedded directly into EMR workflows, patient portals, and care management platforms. The organization also provides care planning tools, symptom checkers, and clinical decision support resources.

Rather than competing with EMR vendors, Healthwise partners with major EHR systems including Epic, Cerner, Allscripts, athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, NextGen Healthcare, and Meditech. Healthcare organizations license Healthwise content to enhance their existing EMR capabilities with patient education and engagement features. The content is customizable and can be tailored to specific populations, reading levels, and languages.

Healthwise serves over 1,900 hospitals and health systems globally, reaching more than 150 million people annually. Their target market includes large health systems, hospital networks, managed care organizations, and EMR vendors who want to incorporate evidence-based patient education content without developing it internally. The organization maintains a clinical team that continuously reviews and updates content based on current medical evidence and guidelines.

The deployment model is content-as-a-service, where Healthwise provides regular content updates, translations into multiple languages, and technical support for integration. Organizations typically implement Healthwise content through APIs or pre-built integrations with their existing technology stack. The nonprofit status differentiates Healthwise from for-profit content vendors, with a mission focused on improving health literacy and patient outcomes rather than maximizing shareholder returns.

Key strengths include the clinical rigor of content development, breadth of topic coverage, multi-language support, and established integrations with major EMR platforms. However, Healthwise does not provide core EMR functionality such as clinical documentation, order entry, practice management, billing, or scheduling capabilities.