SYNOPSIS:There is a lot of international interest in encouraging, and perhaps mandating, more standardisation in the ways patients are managed. This movement to reduce variation in care is partly driven by the principles of evidence-based medicine, and partly by the idea that it will improve patient outcomes while reducing costs.

Moves to reduce variation in care have been around for a very long time, including at RCH, but there is now renewed interest as governments and organisations struggle to manage increasing demand and financial pressures on healthcare systems.

This session will cover some of our experience in this area through methods such as clinical practice guidelines but more importantly will challenge those who attend to think where we want to go with this concept in the coming years.

RCH has recently announced that it will be installing a comprehensive Electronic Medical Record system. The system will have sophisticated tools for Clinical Decision Support. CDS has great potential to standardise and improve patient care but tapping into this potential requires a lot of engagement and planning from the staff and departments that want take advatage of it. We need you to start thinking about this now.We also need to think about the impact on training and medical decision making. We want to standardise and improve care but we don’t want to prevent our trainees (or ourselves) from thinking critically and we don’t want to stifle innovation.

Just like great chefs don’t just follow a recipe, great clinicians need to be able to do so much more than allow a computer system to manage their patients.

SPEAKER:Professor Mike South is a renowned paediatrician who has worked at the Royal Children’s Hospital for 26 years. He is currently the hospital’s Chief Medical Information Officer, responsible for building the new Clinical Information System. Mike was for over 20 years, and until recently, the Director of General Medicine and intensive care consultant. In 2010 he was awarded the Gold Medal by RCH for outstanding services to the hospital and to paediatrics. He was closely involved in the planning of the new hospital, and many of its functional features are Mike’s touches. Along with staff in the Emergency Department, Mike established the Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPG) web-site at RCH at a time when guidelines were rarely used, and this has improved standardisation of practice at RCH. Mike’s influence in paediatrics goes way beyond RCH, and he manages an email network that reaches over 7000 subscribers with vital clinical information, and the RCH CPG are followed in countries throughout the world.