The Paracetamol Pathway Application was originally inspired by a presentation delivered at the European Care Pathways Association conference in London on the 26th Feb 2014.

This presentation described the complexities of the assessment and treatment of paracetamol overdose and how simplification of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine pathway incorporating sequential steps in a paper tool has helped.

It was apparent that an IT solution could take a different slant and introduce more simplicity at the user interface whilst retaining and improving accuracy in the underlying calculations and decision points.

With this in mind a working prototype was created in HTML utilising the JQuery and JQueryUI framework and subsequently submitted as a Code4Health challenge. More recently extra functionality has been added to a further working prototype.

This approach has the added potential of being capable of harvesting data at a granular level which may be utilised in the future to further refine the pathway, this dovetails well with an "improvement framework" that was presented to the European Care Pathways conference in Reggio Emilia Italy with co-authors Karen Green and Gill Pope.

Reference: Pope, G., Green, K. and Salter, J. (2015). “The Intelligence Framework” (a conceptual model to describe service quality) as an enabler for Quality Improvement. In: International Care Pathways Conference. Reggio Emilia: University of Reggio Emilia.