In the coming days, Streamliners will share this news with local media.

"NHS Wales adopts the first nationwide implementation of HealthPathways, across all seven Welsh health boards. Christchurch-founded HealthPathways has been in use almost universally in health systems across Australia and New Zealand for a decade; it is now being adopted at scale in the United Kingdom.

Following a successful trial in Cardiff and Vale, Streamliners, the developer of HealthPathways, has been successful in securing agreement for what will be the first national implementation of the system that drives and supports healthcare integration. 

HealthPathways is an online guidance tool used by tens of thousands of front-line clinicians daily to make better informed decisions with their patients, based on locally agreed pathways of care for 600 clinical conditions. The pathways are informed by evidence, shared and improved by a collaborative community of over sixty health systems caring for around 35 million people.

The NHS Wales Clinical Lead of the roll-out, Dr Alastair Roeves, says:

“The Cardiff and Vale implementation of HealthPathways gave us confidence in the value of rolling-out across the rest of the country. In Cardiff and Vale it contributed to significant health system improvements including:

• Greatest reduction in ENT (Ear, Nose, and Throat) Outpatient waiting lists in Wales, and lowest number of people waiting over a year
• Backlog slashed by 75% by a cluster lead GP in another Health Board who used the same ENT pathways to review all of his ENT outpatients
• Up to 30% reduction in absolute numbers of accepted hip referrals entering Orthopaedics outpatients, with also a greater proportion of referrals being redirected
• Around 66% reduction in referrals for MRIs for knees and spines
• Ability to rapidly change clinical pathways to increase value

When scaled nationally it will directly support the five work streams of the Strategic Programme for Planned Care, and will magnify their impact. It also directly supports the Unscheduled Care, Primary Care and Mental Health and End of Life Care programmes – and thereby will also indirectly support the Planned Care Programme by reducing barriers to flow in these other programmes.”

The HealthPathways core content, standards, processes, methods, software and services are developed and delivered by the New Zealand-based company, Streamliners.

The Streamliners CEO, Ian Anderson, says:

“It’s really exciting to be working with NHS Wales on this project. It’s the first time we’ve rolled out HealthPathways across a whole country, on a green-fields basis, in partnership with a peak body like NHS Wales. It means we can get really high levels of collaboration across all the Health Boards from the get-go, which will speed up the drive to reduce unwarranted variation in clinical practice, and optimise the rapid adoption of new evidence informed models of care.

Closer to home in Australia and New Zealand we’ve had organic adoption of HealthPathways, health board by health board. We still facilitate collaboration and pathway sharing amongst the boards through our toolsets and services, but it’s harder to align everyone’s priorities to optimise the effectiveness of sharing and alignment.

That said, I should make special mention of the Clinical Excellence team at Queensland Health. They saw the potential of HealthPathways as a method to achieve more consistent and effective care across the State way back in 2016, and take a leadership role in facilitating collaboration between the HHSs and PHNs across the State. New South Wales Health is now following suit, as is Te Whatu Ora in New Zealand.” "

We'll also refer media to HealthPathways Global for more general information about HealthPathways, and FAQs developed to accompany this media advisory. If you have any questions about this update, please have a chat with your community success manager.