Clinical Decision Support

Clinical Decision Support, Odyssey, is an innovative and flexible clinical decision support solution, which enables non-clinicians, clinicians and patients to assess the urgency of a patient’s symptoms and direct them to the most appropriate care. Clinical Decision Support can be used on a mobile phone, tablet or web site by patients to perform their own self-assessment, and by clinicians and non-clinical staff on PCs and laptops to help prioritise and direct care. It has been in successful and safe use around the world for more than 25 years. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) accredited the Clinical Decision Support (Odyssey) content development process as a mark of quality between 2013 and 2024 before closing its accreditation programme in July 2024.

Clinical Decision Support encompasses everything from simple guidance documentation through to a full triage assessment which steps the user through a series of questions. Our solution provides an intuitive assessment process using a series of questions which relate to the patient’s symptoms, drawing from a bank of age and sex specific question and answer sets linked to both physical and mental health. The system automatically calculates the urgency and potential care settings as more questions are answered.

We can help you plan and implement effective triage tailored to your requirements, from patient self-assessment to full clinical decision support for clinicians. Drawing on over 25 years’ experience in a variety of primary and urgent care settings, our consultants and clinicians can help ensure your patient triage functions are efficient, effective and safe, using the Clinical Decision Support solution. And by using our Clinical Decision Support solution you’ll be able to accurately measure your triage performance across the entire organisation, helping maintain quality and supporting staff training and development.

With ever-increasing pressure on health services to deliver more capacity, often without any commensurate increase in funding, Clinical Decision Support can help ensure patients are safely routed to the most appropriate care setting quickly and effectively. In some cases that will be away from the organisation providing the triage, freeing critical time and capacity for those patients who do need to be seen. If that triage is performed by the patient themselves, using a smart phone or a web site, then the additional cost to the organisation is almost zero, again freeing precious time and resource.

Clinical Decision Support helps to avoid human error, not every member of staff speaking with the patient will be able to diagnose them from listening to their symptoms. Without Clinical Decision Support a patient could be misdiagnosed and sent to the wrong course of care, wasting time for patients and clinical staff. In more severe cases, when a staff member doesn’t have all the information they need, a life-threatening problem could be overlooked, but by putting the required information into the Clinical Decision Support assessment a high-risk patient will be flagged immediately.

No matter who the patient is, every patient will get the same treatment through patient centred care.