This year the WHO World Patient Safety Day is focused on correct and timely diagnosis, with the slogan “Get it right, make it safe!”

You might think that this is all about clinical management, but in a modern health service the data management is key. As the WHO say: “Diagnostic errors can include missed, incorrect, delayed or miscommunicated diagnoses. … Understanding the diagnostic process is key to reducing errors.”

Or to capture more pithily how things go wrong, consider the NHS’s dispiritingly familiar expression “lost to follow-up”.

This is not about the diagnostic step alone – it is about the whole pathway to diagnosis.  And elective pathways are complicated. They can cross multiple hospital departments, even different hospitals, all with incompatible IT systems.

The first step towards correct and timely management is to unify all that data and present it cleanly, so that staff who manage the pathways can see exactly what every patient needs next, and when, with fail-safes to catch any who might slip through the net.

Sure, you could do this with a shiny new EPR system… probably. Or by linking data yourself into a dashboard… until one of the underlying systems changes. Or you take a more reliable approach.

The different with Insource’s technology is that it works with the underlying IT systems you have, and maintains continuity if any of them change. Even if you upgrade an entire PAS/EPR, the elective pathway management systems and all the statutory and internal reporting carry on working as if nothing had changed.

When things aren’t going right, the symptoms of rickety elective pathway management are diverse: pop-ons, ultra-long waiters, untracked follow-ups and active monitoring, poor data quality, and more. But the solutions come back to the same things: good data, and good tracking. We are experts at solving these problems and have a long NHS track record, so get in touch and together we can help your patients reach a correct and timely diagnosis.