Tackling the elective backlog

As the backlog of patients reaches the 5 million mark, some in the industry are questioning if this is the time for #NHSE targets to migrate from time, to severity, prioritising those with greater pain and need over those that joined the queue first. Potential benefits could range from preventing unnecessary worsening of conditions to cost savings on additional and more costly treatments avoided by prioritising on severity of complaint and speed of degradation/deterioration.

However, there are consequences for such a migration. How do you ensure fair access to treatment? How can you guarantee that patients don’t exaggerate their pain levels in order to get treatment sooner? How do you standardise severity across a nation and quantify it, especially if your clinic is made up of severe cases as many specialist centres might experience?

Maybe the answer is a hybrid model? Maybe this is the time for products like Amplitude, that enable an automated review of patient recorded outcomes as well as the ability to accurately record granularity of the patient’s actual diagnosis and associated comorbidities, so that the clinician can easily make informed decisions by having easy and instant access to a combination of their patient’s actual clinical condition, their work and social limitations as a result of their conditions and a tabulated view of their severity outcome scores. 

What are your thoughts?