A Patient’s Journey for an Elective Surgery
The path to an elective surgery can contain many difficulties for both patients and clinicians. It is a lengthy, as well as daunting, process for the patient, while delays and cancellations can be extremely costly for the healthcare provider.
Researchers
- Dr Mirza Baig – Principal Investigator. Clinical Decision Support Manager, Orion Health
- Dr Farhaan Mirza – IT & Software Engineering Lecturer, Auckland University of Technology
- Dr Ehsan Ullah – Clinical Effectiveness Advisor, Auckland Hospital, Auckland District Health Board
An Automated Approach Towards Prioritisation and Preoperative Assessment
The path to an elective surgery can contain many difficulties for both patients and clinicians. It is a lengthy, as well as daunting, process for the patient, while delays and cancellations can be extremely costly for the healthcare provider. This research project looked at how to devise the most productive processes and systems for managing the end-to-end elective surgery journey for patients.
A key finding of this project was that collecting rich data about the end-to-end Elective Surgery process, using advanced tools and technologies is critical to enable a data-driven approach to process improvement.
This research also found that patients need be more involved in the process, with more communication and information sharing required.
The project revealed many opportunities for process optimisation, for example:
- Nurse-led triage
- Allowing multiple stakeholders to work on a patient’s case concurrently
- Digitising patient health questionnaires along with appropriate clinical workflow
- Scheduling a patient’s anaesthesia service visit on the same day as their First Surgical Assessment
- Using advanced tools to schedule/re-schedule patients, wait list planning and staff management
- Using mobile apps to improve engagement and enable a more mobile workforce