Improving diagnoses for patient safety
It's World Patient Safety Day 2024 and Altera Digital Health is looking at how our solutions support this year’s theme of improving diagnosis for patient safety.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines the terms “diagnosis” and “diagnostic errors” as follows: “A diagnosis identifies a patient’s health problem and is a key to accessing the care and treatment they need. A diagnostic error is the failure to establish a correct and timely explanation of a patient’s health problem, which can include delayed, incorrect, or missed diagnoses, or a failure to communicate that explanation to the patient.”
A robust diagnostic process is essential for establishing a working diagnosis and determining optimal treatment options with the goal of improving patient outcomes. However, the magnitude of diagnostic errors is profound, accounting for nearly 16% of preventable harm across health systems. With most adults likely to face at least one diagnostic error in their lifetime, substantial work needs to be done to improve the safety of diagnostic processes.1
Altera Digital Health provides solutions to create a more holistic patient view of patient data to improve diagnostic precision for clinicians in the NHS. An Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system stores patient data—medical history, consultation notes, test results, remote monitoring data—in one central place, collating all the information on a patient, regardless of when or where the collection took place. This enables the whole care team to have access to the data to facilitate multi-disciplinary communication and arrival at a timely, accurate diagnosis.
Our Sunrise™ EPR solution is flexible and interoperable, pulling patient data from a variety of sources across a trust or ICS to create a full picture of the patient’s current symptoms and historic information. This enables clinicians to glean insights optimising the diagnostic process, saving clinicians time collating data from multiple disparate sources, reducing the need to repeat investigations, targeting efficient diagnosis and improving patient outcomes.
Aside from recording symptoms, signs and diagnoses within the EPR, configuration provides clinicians with actionable prompts to maximise compliance with best-practice assessments and investigations tailored to the individual patient’s presentation. Not only does this improve safe, efficient practice and reduce variability in care delivery, it also drives analysis of clinical practices to highlight individual variances and inform ongoing iteration and enhancements to care pathways.
Altera supports all users who are on the frontlines, providing the best care for every patient. Our solutions are designed to work with each clinical user to drive the best results across the organisation and community. Find out more: Why choose Altera Digital Health?
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