NSW Health Pathology pushes cost-cutting agenda with new digital platform

NSW Health Pathology has intensified its focus on reducing healthcare expenditure with the rollout of a new digital platform designed to directly target and reduce pathology testing across the state.

BirdsEye tracks how, where and why pathology tests are ordered across NSW emergency departments (EDs), exposing variation in ordering practices and providing clinicians with comparative benchmarks aimed at driving down test volumes where clinically appropriate.

BirdsEye was launched in April by the NSW Health Agency for Clinical Innovation (ACI) to senior ED clinicians and nurses across the state. Developed by the NSW Health Pathology Data and Insights team and co-designed with clinicians in collaboration with ACI, it is now embedded in almost 50 NSW Local Health District EDs.

The system is pitched as delivering “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”.

The program forms part of a broader system-wide exercise to rein in pathology spending by standardising practice and reducing unnecessary or low-value testing across emergency care settings.

Project lead Craig Scowen, Manager Performance and Reporting at NSW Health Pathology, said the tool translates complex data into actionable pressure points for clinicians.

“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.”

Early pilot sites, including Coffs Harbour, Wyong and Royal North Shore hospitals, are now being followed by expansion into Gosford, Sutherland and Wollongong as part of a structured rollout to scale adoption and accelerate savings.

“What we’ve seen at our pilot sites is remarkable,” Scowen said. “Unprecedented visibility empowering decision making, with measurable results in patient outcomes and sustainability.”

At Wyong Hospital ED, clinicians have already reported a marked shift in ordering behaviour linked to the tool. Dr Matthew Knox, Deputy Director, Wyong Hospital ED, said it provided the data backbone for a deliberate reduction strategy.

“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 60% to 53% with no adverse effects for patients and saved an estimated 3.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide.”

More than 300 senior ED clinicians and nurses now have access to BirdsEye, with further expansion planned into Intensive Care Unit and Admitted Patient settings.

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