6 Strategies to Increase Clinical Effectiveness and Improve Patient Outcomes

Together with patient safety and experience, clinical effectiveness is an essential element of any healthcare organisation. The ability to turn learning, experience, evidence and research into better outcomes for patients and service users is key to the success of such bodies, but it requires careful planning, innovative thinking and the ability to overcome challenges to meet these goals. 

With tight budgets and increased demand on services due to a range of factors, the need to strategise effectively is more important than ever. For example, NHS England has ambitious targets for reducing the time patients spend waiting for treatment. In December 2024, the figures showed that 58.9% of those on the waiting list were seen within 18 weeks, but the goal is to improve that to 65% by March 2026 and 92% by March 2029. To achieve this, the relevant organisations and departments must have in place a robust clinical effectiveness process that will support them in treating more patients more quickly whilst maintaining high standards of clinical care. 

This article explores what clinical effectiveness is, strategies you can put in place to achieve it and the challenges you might face whilst working towards better patient health outcomes. 

Key takeaways

• Clinical effectiveness is about improving quality of care for patients
• It uses processes where there is evidence of effectiveness as its basis
• Using clinical guidelines and best practice, organisations can improve health outcomes
• Technology is helping the healthcare sector improve clinical standards
• Evidence of outcomes should be shared with peers to improve standards
• Social and economic factors play a significant role in patients’ health conditions. 

What is clinical effectiveness?

Clinical effectiveness is a process to improve decision making and patient outcomes within healthcare organisations. This quality improvement workflow includes activities, guidelines, clinical audits and evaluations, implemented using best practice derived from research, experience and outcome measurement.  

The idea is to create an environment where healthcare practitioners use evidence-based approaches to informing the delivery of services, leading in turn to an improved treatment process for patients. Essentially, clinical effectiveness is about:

• Doing the right thing
• In the right way
• At the right time
• In the right place
• With the right outcome. 

Good clinical effectiveness involves provisioning access to reliable evidence, upskilling your team to help them reach a level of competence necessary for improving the service, treating patients in a timely manner in a location that suits them and providing positive results from the treatment. This is powered by good clinical governance, creating an environment in which this can occur.

Strategies to increase clinical effectiveness

Enhance evidence-based practice

Ensuring you use the most recent, reliable evidence to guide your healthcare provision means that you take advantage of the latest clinical expertise and understand current patient preferences. This involves integrating robust clinical data, systematic reviews and analyses and the real-world experience of fellow professionals into your daily practice.

To achieve better consistency and higher quality care whilst reducing variability in treatments, you can:

• Require your team to undertake continuous professional development and training to discuss and analyse the latest research, relevant studies and best practice. For example, holding training sessions on new pain management research, such as that by The Walton Centre in Liverpool in the UK on neuromodulation, which could reduce the reliance on opioids. 
• Adopt standardised clinical protocols based on recommendations on professional standards from bodies such as the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) or the World Health Organisation (WHO). For example, using the updated NICE guidance quality standard on the identity identification and management of risk relating to ovarian cancer. 

Leverage technology in healthcare

As demand on healthcare organisations grows, the ability to improve and streamline processes using technology plays an evermore important role in improving clinical effectiveness. In the UK, the current government prioritised the leveraging of tech in its 2024 election manifesto, and the public backs this approach, with 51% of Brits stating that they think digital solutions improve the quality of healthcare, compared with 8% who think it worsens outcomes.  

Technology can streamline workflows, speeding up the process of treating patients, and improve the accuracy of diagnoses, ensuring service users receive the right treatment first. You can also capture and analyse data more easily, leading to better-informed decision making. It drives collaboration, resource allocations and leads to higher-quality care.

Examples include: 

• Health remote monitoring systems can help improve the effectiveness of chronic disease management by detecting the early warning signs of such illnesses and allowing timely treatment. This early detection plays an important role in improving survival rates. They also allow for monitoring to take place at patients’ homes, rather than requiring them to attend hospitals and healthcare centres, reducing overload and providing a more comfortable experience. 
• Meeting management systems allow for a more streamlined meeting preparation process, saving your team time that can be spent on patient-centric work. A meeting portal also helps improve collaboration between stakeholders, including those from different departments between multi-disciplinary team meetings who otherwise would not have many opportunities to communicate away from the meeting room 

Optimise patient-centred care

Taking a patient-centred approach to care helps you align your decisions with their needs, values and preferences, leading to greater satisfaction. Involving patients improves communication to allow your practitioners to better understand what patients need from your organisation. With this comes greater trust from patients and confidence in the service you provide. 

By working with service users, you gain a more holistic understanding of their health and needs beyond just their clinical symptoms. This leads to a more compassionate approach and encourages self-management of symptoms in some cases, reducing pressure on your organisation. 

Here are some ways in which you can implement patient-centred care: 

• Shared decision-making. This means involving patients in discussions about their treatment options, ensuring they understand the risks, benefits and alternatives before making an informed decision that fits their values and lifestyle. 
• Active listening. Train your internal stakeholders on active listening to help them engage in empathetic conversations that get to the heart of the patient’s requirements, fears and needs. When they feel heard, respected and actively involved in shaping their care decisions, they have more confidence in the process. 

Strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration

Patients' care needs very rarely fit into one specific silo within your organisation, so their care is best addressed in a collaborative manner, too. As well as looking externally for best practice in treatment, communicate within your team internally to share insights that could support better outcomes in your organisation. The answers to these questions could well be in-house and, by working together, you can develop an effective approach that improves outcomes. 

Examples of how to improve collaboration in clinical practice include: 

• Holding multidisciplinary team meetings on a regular basis and ensuring that you put in place workflows to reduce administrative burden and allow for more discussion of patient cases between stakeholders with diverse skill sets. 
• Coordinated approaches to all aspects of care for specific conditions can lead to earlier interventions and improved recovery times. For instance, in stroke management, a collaborative approach between neurologists, physiotherapists, speech therapists and occupational therapists create a holistic approach to care that can expedite cases and improve outcomes. 

Measure and monitor clinical performance

Clinical effectiveness relies on using data and evidence to improve performance and you can carry out your own monitoring in-house to help you understand where your service is working and where improvements are needed. Measure your performance in key areas and monitor your progress to ensure you are continually improving your service to patients. 

Examples of ways to implement this to uphold your professional standards include: 

• Establishing key performance indicators (KPI) for what you deem to be treatment success in terms of patient recovery rates, adverse event reduction, cost effectiveness and other important areas. 
• Conduct routine clinical audits of your practice and feedback sessions with your teams, collate the outcomes and compare with previous reports. This will help you understand whether care is improving and where the areas of improvement are. 

Address social and economic barriers to care

The social detriments of health are factors that affect our health and include where we live and how much we earn. The Parents Association highlights ‘left behind’ neighbourhoods with worse socio-economic outcomes and lower levels of social infrastructure than others. In these areas, people can find it more difficult to access the GP appointments they need, for example. 

To be able to improve outcomes in your organisation, you must make sure that you address these barriers so that all service users experience effective care. 

Here are some ways to achieve this:

• Factor social detriments into patient care plans, taking into account accessibility to transportation, affordability of parking fees. This could mean conducting house visits, scheduling out-of-hours appointments, conducting telephone or video consultations and similar outreach activities. 
• Conduct social prescribing to connect patients with community groups, support services, housing support, food banks and mental health charities to address matters that can lead to medical problems before they do so. 

Barriers to achieving clinical effectiveness

Barrier	Explanation
Resource constraints	Chronic underfunding and staffing shortages limit capacity for quality improvement initiatives. This requires more streamlined workflows and processes to make the most efficient use of resources.
Frequent reorganisation	Constant structural changes disrupt continuity and impede long-term clinical effectiveness strategies.
Bureaucratic burdens	Overly complex administrative processes detract from patient-centred care and innovation uptake, taking up the time of practitioners.
Training gaps	Clinical effectiveness relies on up-to-date knowledge of best practice. Without adequate training, your team cannot use the latest research to inform decisions.
Communication and leadership	Weak interdepartmental collaboration and fragmented leadership reduce cohesive strategy implementation.

FAQ

What role do patients play in improving clinical effectiveness?

Patients are essential for achieving better clinical effectiveness. Your approach should be patient-led to ensure you are meeting their specific needs, both for the particular issue they present with and for the all-round wellbeing of the individual. 

How can emerging technologies enhance clinical effectiveness?

Technology is leading improvements in clinical effectiveness in ways such as streamlining processes, improving diagnoses and analysing patient data to identify optimal carepaths. 

What are the financial implications of improving clinical effectiveness?

Improving clinical effectiveness reduces healthcare costs by minimising unnecessary treatments, hospital readmissions and medical errors, while optimising resource allocation and enhancing patient outcomes.

References and further reading

• Institute of Health Equity report on health inequalities
• How to improve accountability in healthcare
• How to write a medical staff meeting agenda
• The 7 pillars of clinical governance
• How to streamline healthcare meeting management