Want a bird’s eye look at how, where and why pathol­o­gy tests are ordered across NSW emer­gency depart­ments (EDs)? Or take a deep dive into test order­ing vari­a­tion for spe­cif­ic conditions?

This is the extra­or­di­nary lev­el of infor­ma­tion that NSW Health Pathol­o­gy can now offer its clin­i­cal part­ners via a new pathol­o­gy data vis­i­bil­i­ty tool, BirdsEye.

The tool was launched to more than 60 of the state’s senior ED clin­i­cians and nurs­es by NSW Health’s Agency for Clin­i­cal Inno­va­tion (ACI) in April 2026.

Built by our Data and Insights team and co-designed with clin­i­cians in col­lab­o­ra­tion with ACI, it is now in use at almost 50 NSW Local Health Dis­trict emer­gency departments.

Inten­sive Care Unit and Admit­ted Patient ver­sions of the tool are now planned.

What does it do?

Pathol­o­gy test­ing has a fun­da­men­tal impact on the diag­no­sis and out­comes of patients vis­it­ing EDs. Order­ing too many, too few or inap­pro­pri­ate tests can lead to mis­di­ag­no­sis, increased length of stay and risk of return­ing to the ED days lat­er with the same con­di­tion. Order­ing the ‘right’ tests more con­sis­tent­ly is ben­e­fi­cial to patients, the envi­ron­ment and over­all cost to the health system.

Bird­s­Eye puts pathol­o­gy order­ing intel­li­gence direct­ly in the hands of ED clin­i­cians by triage cat­e­go­ry, by test type, bench­marked against peer sites across NSW. Data can even be viewed accord­ing to diag­no­sis against more than 11,500 pre­sent­ing problems.

Project lead Craig Scowen, our Man­ag­er Per­for­mance and Report­ing, said it’s an exam­ple of gen­uine co-design.

“Our devel­op­ment team turned a com­plex data chal­lenge into some­thing ele­gant, intu­itive, and gen­uine­ly use­ful to clin­i­cians on the floor,” he said.

“ED clin­i­cians gave their time to help design and val­i­date it, ensur­ing that what we built reflect­ed the real­i­ty of emer­gency med­i­cine and right test, right time outcomes.”

Meet our ear­ly adopters

The Coffs Har­bour, Wyong and Roy­al North Shore hos­pi­tal EDs were ear­ly adopters of the tool in a tri­al that will now expand to Gos­ford, Suther­land and Wol­lon­gong to encour­age take-up and inform fur­ther enhancements.

“What we’ve seen at our pilot sites is remark­able,” Craig said.

“Unprece­dent­ed vis­i­bil­i­ty empow­er­ing deci­sion mak­ing, with mea­sur­able results in patient out­comes and sustainability.”

Dr Matthew Knox, Deputy Direc­tor, Wyong Hos­pi­tal ED, said the tool had been essen­tial in tai­lor­ing the sus­tain­able pathol­o­gy order­ing project to that site.

“We start­ed out with the high­est rate of pathol­o­gy test­ing in our peer group and we’re now down to fifth which is real­ly encour­ag­ing,” he said.

“The tool showed we were in the high range across all tests, so we focused on help­ing staff iden­ti­fy that they could reduce this with a safe­ty-first approach.

“From Jan­u­ary 2025 to Jan­u­ary 2026 we reduced our order­ing from 60pc to 53pc with no adverse effects for patients and saved an esti­mat­ed 3.2 tonnes of car­bon dioxide”.

What’s next?

Bird­s­eye realis­es the next stage in our statewide Pathol­o­gy Stew­ard­ship pro­gram which aims to ensure test order­ing across NSW Health is tar­get­ed and sus­tain­able – the right test deliv­ered for the right patient each time.

More than 300 senior ED clin­i­cians and nurs­es now have access to Bird­s­eye and are log­ging in to explore its capa­bil­i­ties. They’re also book­ing train­ing ses­sions with Craig and the team to ensure they get the most out of it.

Work is now begin­ning on the ICU ver­sion of the tool.

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