Our clinical decision support solution, Odyssey, helps ensure patients with urgent and primary care health problems receive fast, accurate, safe assessment and advice. It covers the needs of all age groups, and the full range of symptoms and acute conditions. By upskilling health care providers’ staff, it supports a greater skill mix in the workforce and consistency of care. Odyssey is used by healthcare professionals across a range of settings, including ambulance services, out-of-hours services, GP practices and walk-in centres.
ODYSSEY
Clinical Decision Support
HELPS SAVE UNNECESSARY
NICE - ACCREDITED
SINCE 2013
OVER 20 YEARS' EXPERIENCE
HELPING HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS
Understanding key issues
CHALLENGES
The population
With people living longer with more complicated conditions, there is increasing pressure on healthcare systems. It is vital that the people with the most pressing symptoms receive urgent care.
People require complex care
There are increasing numbers of people living with multi-morbidity and complex conditions that are at risk of rapid deterioration. Assessing the needs of such patients requires a holistic assessment.
Making the best use of appointments
There is increasing pressure on GP appointment systems and emergency services. It is vital to prioritise patients and ensure they are following the most appropriate care pathway.
Lack of clinical staff
The NHS faces a major workforce crisis, with insufficient GPs, nurses and emergency department staff, which means a greater skill mix is required to substitute for scarce doctors and nurses.
How Odyssey can help you
FEATURES & BENEFITS
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Patient-centred Care
Patient experience is at the heart of our approach, and Odyssey ensures that patients receive right-first-time advice with appropriate signposting to the best service. We work with the Patients’ Association to optimise the question style and language.
Age and gender differentiationQuestions are specifically designed to be age and gender-specific. Patients are only asked questions relevant to their circumstances. The weighting applied to answers automatically takes this into account.
Patient self-assessmentOdyssey’s lay clinical content allows patients to drive their own triage with an app or website. By linking this to appointment systems or follow-up consultations, patients get appropriate levels of care.
Supports a wide range of servicesOdyssey integrates with other IT systems to ensure the patient receives the best outcome no matter which service they use. The Odyssey summary, triage outcome and signposting are key information sources.
Familiar processesOdyssey’s questioning style is conversational and open. It fits with the natural pattern of a consultation and is intuitive and user-friendly for both clinicians and patients.
Locally-configured signposting
With signposting locally configured, patients are at ease that any follow-up care will be within their local area. This is critical when linked to clinical emergencies, as well as to urgent care.
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Intuitive triage
Odyssey provides clinical and non-clinical staff with an intuitive decision support solution. Its question sets cover the full range of patient presentations, from pregnancy to end of life care. This ensures patients get the best possible assessment and advice.
Specific questioningOdyssey includes 450 age and gender-specific question sets. These seamlessly interact with each other, to enable multiple symptoms to be assessed simultaneously. Key ‘red flag’ symptoms are also identified.
In-depth question setsOdyssey question sets allow in-depth assessment, where this is appropriate. This includes consideration of the full range of physical symptoms, but also mental health and social care needs.
Symptom alertsOdyssey supports early intervention by interrupting assessments once potentially life-threatening symptoms have been identified. This prevents delays associated with needless additional assessment.
TrainingOdyssey’s intuitive style and simple screen layout, makes learning how to use it an enjoyable and straightforward experience. We provide e-learning and face to face training to support users.
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Interoperability
Odyssey supports the drive for interoperability across healthcare settings, by enabling patient data to be shared between different services. Key Odyssey data is SNOMED-coded, and the Odyssey clinical summary can be integrated into care records or saved as a pdf.
Helping all health and care settingsIntegration capabilities allow Odyssey to work across a variety of settings including services in primary, social and urgent & emergency care. Odyssey can integrate with all the major IT systems in general practice.
Joined up healthcareOdyssey generates a clinical summary and managed care plan, which can be used across a wide range of primary, secondary, urgent and emergency care services.
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Clinical accuracy
Odyssey sets the benchmark in the UK and internationally, with its NICE-accredited guideline development processes. Our Clinical Knowledge Unit has been managing the development of the clinical database for over 20 years, and has handled 30 million episodes of care.
Tailored clinical contentClinical content can be tailored for different localities, as well as having mirror-image versions with clinical and non-clinical language. We provide versions in the UK, New Zealand, Australia, Eire and Switzerland.
NICE - accreditedWe are unique in having been accredited by NICE as a guideline developer for urgent and primary care triage, and have held this accreditation since 2013.
Continuous clinical content updatesOur Clinical Knowledge Unit continuously tests the clinical content, to maintain its high standards. The entire content is reviewed on a rolling 3-yearly basis, with more responsive reviews as required.
Age and gender differentiationFrequently Asked Questions
- What is Odyssey?
Odyssey is an innovative and flexible clinical decision support solution, which enables non-clinicians and clinicians alike to assess the urgency of a patient’s symptoms and direct them to the most appropriate care. Odyssey 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 20 years, and is NICE-accredited.
- What is an example of clinician decision support?
Clinical decision support encompasses everything from simple guidance documentation through to software which steps the user through a series of questions. Odyssey provides a computerised assessment process using a series of questions which relate to the patient’s symptoms, drawing from a bank of age and gender specific question and answer sets linked to both physical and mental health. The system automatically calculates the urgency and potential care settings for symptoms as more questions are answered, resulting in a recommended priority level and suggested care settings.
- How does my organisation ensure effective triage for patients?
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 20 years’ experience in a variety of primary, urgent and unscheduled care settings, our consultants and clinicians can help ensure your patient triage functions are efficient, effective and safe, using the Odyssey solution. And by using Odyssey you’ll be able to accurately measure your triage performance across the entire organisation, helping maintain quality and supporting staff training and development.
- What are the benefits of clinical decision support software?
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 smartphone or web site, then the cost to the organisation is almost zero, again freeing precious time and resource.
- Why is clinical decision support important?
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 Odyssey database a high risk patient will be flagged up immediately.
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Additional insights to help you transform
RESOURCES
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Odyssey clinical decision support
Our market-leading, NICE-accredited solution for clinical decision support solution enables healthcare providers to deliver accurate triage and signposting of patients.
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