To reduce the time doctors and nurses spend on paper-based administrative tasks and allow them more time to focus on helping patients, Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) is using Arezzo, the Clinical Pathway solution from Elsevier, the global information analytics business specializing in science and health, and part of RELX Group.
The implementation of Arezzo at GOSH is helping doctors and nurses make smarter care decisions. Arezzo takes medical guidelines, protocols, and order sets, combines them with relevant patient information and presents personalized patient pathways and testing advice to clinicians. The result is an efficient process from the decision-to-admit to the decision-to-treat based on the results of the investigations performed.
Commenting on the use of the system so far, Dr. Catherine Peters, consultant in Paediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes, said, “In practical terms Arezzo allows our medical staff to spend more time on the ward with patients, not buried in paperwork. The intricacy of the software algorithms means it is capable of interpreting sets of physician requests and suggesting the optimum care pathway and timing of tests that an individual child might need.”
A second valuable contribution Arezzo provides is reducing resource wastage and saving budget. Waste, such as ordering unnecessary tests, is estimated to account for 30 percent of healthcare spend.[1] By reducing unnecessary procedures, Arezzo is helping GOSH to improve its efficiency at a time when the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is under pressure to identify inefficiencies.
“The Kingfisher Ward at GOSH manages highly complex conditions which require many hours of planning by the medical staff,” said Tim Hawkins, Managing Director, Clinical Solutions EMEALA and APAC. “Arezzo is helping the medical staff analyse the situation and deliver care pathway suggestions based on each patient’s personal needs. That’s a precious outcome, giving the medical staff more time to spend with their patients.”
Elsevier and GOSH, an NHS Foundation Trust hospital, are working towards expanding the current implementation of Arezzo as part of the Trust’s new electronic patient record (EPR) system rollout, potentially enabling the system to consume much richer data sets, which in turn will allow GOSH to fully realize Arezzo’s decision support capabilities.
References
1 D. Berwick (2013), The Berwick Report
