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Cegedim Healthcare Solutions explains why its first secondary care customer demonstrates the company’s commitment to innovation.
Getting new customers is always exciting but helping University Hospital Southampton (UHS) NHS Foundation Trust replace its old Map of Medicine pathway tool with Outcomes Manager is also a landmark first step for Cegedim into the secondary care sector.
When it was announced in July 2018 that Map of Medicine was withdrawing from the market and discontinuing support for more than 420 digital clinical decision pathways, the team at UHS felt a bit isolated but we’ll let Jo Watts, Global Digital Exemplar, programme manager at UHS explain the situation the Trust was in.
Jo explained it like this:
“Map of Medicine was a pretty awesome product so we were surprised and disappointed when it was withdrawn. It wasn’t long before we got over the shock and saw it as an opportunity. We scoured the market and came across Outcomes Manager pathway and decision support tool in the primary care space and started talking to them. As well as Outcomes Manager’s pathway authoring tools and population health analytics, we really liked the fact that we could move our existing 126 Map of Medicine pathways into Outcomes Manager.
“More importantly, we really wanted to collaborate with a company and work with a team that were interested in taking our ideas and helping us deliver on them. As a digital exemplar Trust, what we intend to do is develop approaches that are usable by other trusts.
"Also the fact that Cegedim hadn’t worked in secondary care was important to us. When we asked Cegedim questions, the team was immediately interested in working with us. We have an agenda that doesn’t usually suit solution providers like Epic and Cerner. We are interested in interoperability, open data and open standards. Cegedim spoke our language. As a Global Digital Exemplar we are also looking to make the market more vibrant and give smaller organisations an opportunity.”
That’s a great endorsement from Jo and Cegedim is going to make sure we deliver for UHS.
Clinical pathways are a big part of the Trust’s clinical decision support strategy and how clinicians want to manage and curate knowledge. The system currently has 700 hits a month, and this jumps to 1000 when junior doctors arrive in the Autumn.
The first stage in the project will be transitioning UHS’s 126 existing clinical pathways to Outcomes Manager using its integration engine. Then the hospital has 170 new pathways they want to add alongside a regulated system for authoring pathways using Cegedim’s authoring tools.
The hospital’s main focus is to give its first and second year students a reliable source of best practice workflows that are trusted by the hospital’s senior consultants. If a patient with suspected sepsis presents, a student or junior doctor will be able to consult Outcomes Manager on their mobile phone and be certain where the patient is on the pathway and what the best next steps are. Jo added:
“Being able to view the pathways on any device anywhere was also a big bonus for us. Map of Medicine was PC-based and required logins to access. Outcomes Manager is going to integrate with our existing system which will just save time.”
Once these changes have bedded in, UHS intends to start using Outcomes Manager to look at compliance with guidelines. Jo said:
“Ultimately, we want to understand whether a doctor looking at a pathway led to a change of action or behaviour. One of the great things about Outcomes Manager is that it can tell us what people actually did.”
If the programme is successful, it may be adopted by Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust which is UHS’s “fast follower” Trust.
The contract with University Hospital Southampton is a great boost for Cegedim Healthcare Solutions because it demonstrates the difference between the competition and us - we’ve invested in our products and based that investment on our clients’ problems. We genuinely believe we can make a difference. We’d honestly pack up and go home if we didn’t.
