Supporting Elective Recovery at Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust with Implementation of Digital Pre-Operative Assessment Platform
Image created by Rudy Chidiac. © Open Medical 2025. All Rights Reserved
Open Medical’s digital pre-operative assessment platform, Pathpoint ePOA, has launched this week in Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust (PAHT).
This marks a significant milestone in PAHT’s digital transformation for patient care. By adopting Pathpoint, the trust is set to digitise the entire pre-operative assessment (POA) service, improving the process for elective surgery preparation.
All patients requiring surgery must complete a POA health questionnaire prior to surgery, to assess their health, long-term conditions and to be deemed fit to proceed for their operation. However, the current digital system, Alex Health (Cerner) does not have digital POA functionality. Therefore POAs were being completed by calling patients on the phone, writing down the answers on paper, and updating this onto Alex Health manually. This resulted in administrative burdens for clinical staff and an inconvenient process for patients. Additionally, the POA process often begins just 1-2 weeks before the patient's date of surgery, leaving an insufficient amount of time to prepare and optimise patients for surgery.
Empowering patients, enhancing clinical decisions
The focus of implementing Pathpoint ePOA is to deliver a more efficient, streamlined and patient-friendly healthcare experience.
Patients are now automatically sent a digital POA as soon as they are added to the waiting list, which they are able to complete in their own time, from the comfort of their own home. This eliminates unnecessary hospital visits, saving the patient’s time, travel costs, and delivering information quicker to the clinician.
This transformation not only brings convenience and ease to the patients, this also will improve surgical outcomes, reducing length of stay and improving theatre utilisation. Pathpoint captures highly granular data, helping to improve timely patient optimisation with early identification of key health issues for optimisation programmes such as weight loss, hypertension & smoking cessation, to give patients the most time to be surgery ready and thereby, reduce the risk of cancellations.
By screening patients early, PAHT will enhance their oversight of their elective waiting list and create a pool of patients that are fit-for-surgery, so when inevitable cancellations do happen, they are able to fill the beds. This not only benefits patients and helps with elective recovery, but also brings financial incentives through efficient theatre utilisation.
Introducing our new ETL functionality: integration with ease
To offer a full-scale system integration, we have created a simpler, faster and more affordable method to trigger powerful workflows from existing EPR data, to hit the ground running.
Pathpoint’s ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) functionality allows us to take an exported data file of the patient waiting list, provided by the hospital's BI team, and automatically trigger POA workflows in Pathpoint, without the need for direct Cerner integration.
Why is this a transformative feature?
Cost-Effective and Easy: This is a much cheaper and more straightforward alternative to complex and expensive direct integrations.
Engage with Workflows: It allows you to leverage our powerful workflows even when a full integration isn't feasible, or if you are using older systems.
Internal Control: Much of this can be done in-house, giving you more control over the process.
A powerful duo: Pathpoint co-pilots with EPR systems
Working with EPRs to create a digital powerhouse, we optimise our platform to streamline workflows and data to enhance hospitals’ current electronic patient record (EPR) systems side by side.
At Princess Alexandra Hospital, with the existing EPR Cerner, we were able to provide the powerful workflow and digital patient engagement capabilities of Pathpoint ePOA, alongside the current health information system with minimal duplication or burden for staff.
This combination is the key to creating an efficient and scalable solution across the NHS, providing an advanced workflow alongside EPRs.
From pilot to launch
We are pleased to give patients and their clinicians the digital platform solution to enable a smoother, efficient process for their healthcare journey.
A huge congratulations and thank you to the team at Princess Alexandra Trust Hospital & the Open Medical Team for their smooth collaboration and delivery of this project.
We strive to continue to deliver sustainable healthcare solutions through digital excellence across multiple specialties in healthcare sites in the UK and beyond.
