UpHill, Hospital da Luz Leaning Health (Luz Saúde Group) and the Engineering Faculty of Beira Interior University (UBI) obtained one million euros funding for a project of Research and Development (R&D), with the purpose of optimization of clinical pathways to guarantee that all patients are treated based on the best scientific evidence and, consequently, ensuring higher safety and better health results. Between the first contact with a patient until establishing a diagnosis, performing a medical action, or prescribing treatments, a health professional must take numerous clinical decisions that must be based on updated scientific evidence applicable to each case. Therefore, these last years, several entities, such as scientific societies, have dedicated to issue clinical guidance to help physicians in the moment of decision as to the path to follow for each patient to treat. The impact of clinical decision in the quality of healthcare is frequently associated with clinical error. Estimates suggest a cost of 19 thousand million dollars a year in the United States, and, in Portugal, the incidence rate of avoidable adverse events in in-hospital environment is around 11%. However, and although alarming, these numbers are only part of the reality, where the so-called ‘suboptimal care’ has a more substantial weigh on clinical error. «Clinical decision will always be surrounded by some degree of uncertainty, that can be of technical, personal or conceptual nature. Nevertheless, it is possible to mitigate technical and conceptual uncertainty, by providing – in the time and space of the clinical decision-making – detailed, updated, multidimensional and reliable information, related with the approach to the disease or syndrome in question. This has been precisely the focus point of UpHill, with the development of algorithms to support clinical decision, which will now reach a new level», explains Eduardo Freire Rodrigues, the cofounder and CEO of UpHill. Despite a few efforts and the existing relation between adherence to best practices and the positive results demonstrated in several studies, challenges persist in what concerns the transposition of scientific evidence to the actual healthcare providing. Aspects like the rate of evidence production, the needs of health units and the adjustment of recommendations to clinical practice are frequently pointed out as obstacles to the implementation and adoption of best practices in health. «The addPath will allow to significantly advance the technical-scientific knowledge on the outlined challenges that still obstruct the adoption of clinical pathways, providing answers and solutions, and positioning this project as a fundamental component for the generalized implementation of health based on evidence, at local, national and international level» , concludes Eduardo Freire Rodrigues. In its turn, Filipe Costa, the Head of Value Based Healthcare of Luz Saúde Group, adds: «Luz Saúde Group has a project of Value-based Healthcare that aims to improve the chain of value throughout the whole cycle of care. To implement this vision, it is essential to equip the teams with tools potentiating the effectiveness of clinical decision. The concept of VBHC on the basis of these initiatives has repercussions in terms of results for patients, but also in the reduction of variability in healthcare providing and, consequently, having great impact in costs for health units» . Sílvia Socorro, vice-rector for Research, Innovation and Development at UBI, states, in its turn, that «this is a project of the utmost relevance for the impact it may have on the improvement of clinical decision, for health professionals, that enhance the effectiveness of their performance, and for patients, that benefit from the optimization of decisions better adapted to the resolution of their health problems» . «It is also worth noting that the addPath project and the innovation capacity associated are in line with the latest advances at world level in the area, thus expecting most promising results» , she concluded. The project was co-financed in the scope of the incentives to Portugal 2020 IDT +CO3SO, a series of cross-sectional and multi-sectoral programs designed for companies, social economy entities and scientific-technological field entities.
