Clinical audit
pathway. This number further increased to 70,000 patients, as the audit gathered pace. It assessed patient experience across a 12-month period, assessing waiting times, time to treatment, clinical response to treatment and reported patient outcomes. So successful was the study, that it expanded into collecting data at diagnosis for some rare immune mediated inflammatory diseases.
Benefits of benchmarking The benefit of reliable insight can go even further to inspire learning and improvement across the whole healthcare ecosystem, while digital technology can inspire greater collaboration. Take, for example, the Royal College of Anaesthetists. Athera Healthcare supported the National Emergency Laparotomy Audit following concerns around high surgery mortality rates. The impact of our collaborative work helped ensure the safety of tens of thousands of patients who will undergo emergency bowel surgery. But, more than that, the audit encouraged real-time information sharing between Trusts to benchmark themselves against others. Ultimately, this makes it possible to understand the position within the national landscape. Understanding the broader patient experience is important – not just for comparison – but for healthcare professionals to spot trends and increase the chance for earlier intervention. Data sharing, such as this, helps move insight from sitting in silos - allowing it to work harder, drive improvements across population health, and better control individual patient experience.
Diagnosing the root cause The insights gathered during clinical audits not only help improve healthcare and patient experience. It’s also imperative in helping the NHS run more efficiently. Take, for example, negligence claims. In 2022/2023, patient negligence claims
cost the NHS in England £2.7bn. An almost 10 per cent increase on the previous year.1
That’s
an eyewatering amount of money being taken away from frontline services. But that figure just paints the cost on the surface. For each of these cases, a great deal of manpower and time was required to understand the root cause and what led up to the issue, identifying trends and missed opportunities. No stone would have been unturned not only to address the claim, but also to ensure opportunity for improvement and to prevent reoccurrence. Everything needs to be deeply understood and action taken. Of course, clinical audits aren’t the only resource the NHS has to help provide a single source of truth. Digital, data-based threads are now spread across the whole health ecosystem. The importance of everything used in healthcare having a digital footprint is critical to care. Take for example how medical implants and materials can now be digitally tracked. Implants and materials have sadly been involved in a number of widely reported and criticised health crises – from PIP breast implants and failed instrument decontamination, to issues caused by using
vaginal mesh, to name a few. These scandals have been one large factor in driving the need for greater processes that use data to trace not only clinical experience, but also the entire journey of the medical devices used. Looking across the pond to the US, the issue of being able to track and trace medical devices – especially those implanted within the body, such as orthopaedic replacements – has become a very hot, and increasingly political, topic.
While their healthcare system is clearly very
different from our NHS, the need to be able to source well-rounded data insights are just as essential. Learning not only how the medical device was implanted or the experience of the patient, but also the origins of the device and the materials used. With around 1 in 25 people in the UK having an implanted medical device,2 being able to understand trends that are linked to specific devices is crucial to improve patient outcomes, and achieve compliance and quality of care. It is also crucial to ensure the right party is held accountable if errors are made, and that it’s not just left to the NHS.
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www.clinicalservicesjournal.com I January 2025
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