Services
Our central service offerings encompass prescribing decision support systems, patient decision aids and audit/review toolkits. All our applications are available free-to-access in the UK.
Decision Support
PDS’s approach to clinical decision support can best be described as the ‘provision of assessments, prompts or recommendations specific to the patient and selected from a knowledge base on the basis of individual patient data’. Our primary application is to support healthcare professionals in their decision-making around the prescription of medicines.
Each of our prescribing decision support tools provide patient-tailored, prescribing recommendations at the point of care. Recommendations are generated by our bespoke software cross-referencing patient-specific profiles with multiple treatment algorithms that are consistent with clinical guidelines.
Whilst we seek to encourage the implementation of best practice, our intention is not to compromise the clinical freedom of practitioners. Rather, our tools aim to provide a level of confidence so that whatever treatment decision is taken, it is done in the knowledge of the evidence base or respective guidelines.
Patient Decision Aids
It is important to note that patient decision aids (PDAs) differ from usual health education materials. Where appropriate, each PDA explicitly states the clinical decision that the patient needs to consider – for example, accepting or refusing treatment. We provide evidence‐based information about a health condition, the options and the associated benefits, harms, probabilities, and scientific uncertainties. We also try to help patients recognise the values‐sensitive nature of the decision and to clarify – either implicitly or explicitly – the value they place on benefits and harms. As with prescribing decision support, the intention is always to supplement – rather than replace – a healthcare professional’s counselling about options.
Our PDAs can be delivered as distinct applications in their own right or as modules incorporated alongside a prescribing decision support tool.
Audit-Review Toolkits
Audit and review toolkits are designed to support practitioners in the identification and review of ‘at risk’ patients for priority review. A proactive and targeted audit can be onerous, and variations in clinical processes and gaps in clinical coding can sometimes result in sub-optimal reporting. Furthermore, limitations and lack of intra-operability associated with GP clinical systems can make the consistent application of best-practice problematic.
Our toolkits incorporate SNOMED CT coding consistent with, often avoidable risk factors that indicate a patient’s risk of poor outcomes or sub-optimal clinical management. Corresponding protocol alerts and search reports (in both EMIS Web and SystmOne) are designed to query the patient record dataset and enable the healthcare professional user to both proactively and opportunistically identify and prioritise patients who would benefit most from a review without contributing unduly to practice workload burden. Templates are then developed to structure the patient review and align with best practice.
Can we help?
If you’re interested in working with us on a particular project or would just like an informal chat about what we do – please get in touch.