Intelligent decision support systems like Gaston provide reliable, real-time information. Gaston helps healthcare providers apply the right policy for each patient, and that is increasingly a necessity.

After all, the care chain is becoming increasingly complex. More and more is possible, which means the number of diseases, complications and conditions that can be treated well increases every year. At the same time, the hospital population is getting older, and conditions of patients aged 65 and over are generally more complex than those of younger patients.

Providing the right care is therefore becoming an increasingly big puzzle: parts of the care are offered in different places by different institutions, departments, disciplines and employees. Both the coordination of this complex care and the sharing of all the information that is needed to determine the right policy are becoming increasingly complicated. Although there is a lot of knowledge and patient information available, the correct Handling of all this information and obtaining a reliable status for each patient is becoming an almost impossible task. Gaston ensures that everyone has the right information available on time.

Anyone who is a link in the care process can use Gaston in their own way. This makes it suitable software for medical specialists, general practitioners, nurses, practice assistants, pharmacists, laboratory technicians and managers.

Gaston can be used for:

• medication monitoring
• medication review
• detecting risk factors during a hospital stay
• prescription in primary care
• management reports
• data collection for evaluations and scientific research

• First of all, Gaston can be linked to almost all healthcare information systems you work with.
• Next, Gaston is a directly deployable system, fully equipped with all possible national guidelines.
• Finally, Gaston can be supplemented with your own clinical rules and work processes. You can expand and maintain the system yourself. For example, with simple 'if-then rules' but also with very complex flowcharts with decisions, observations and actions.

The most important condition is of course is, of course, the presence of the right infrastructure (servers, computers and other hardware). Often this is already present.

The other condition for successful implementation is acceptance by your employees. It is therefore important that they are involved in the implementation of Gaston at an early stage. In addition, it is essential for successful implementation that a permanent contact person who also has substantive knowledge in your organisation is made available for a number of hours for the implementation.

Yes. Gaston offers the possibility to print reports and collect data for scientific research and evaluations.

The basis of Gaston is formed by two modules. The Guideline Module contains the guidelines that apply to your specialism. You can also enter and edit these yourself.
The Decision Support Module then translates your guidelines into steps to be executed by the computer.

Gaston's Decision Module communicates with other patient information systems, such as:

• the general practitioner information system (GPIS)
• the pharmacy information system (AIS)
• the hospital information system (HIS)
• the clinical chemistry lab
• the anesthesia machine
• the patient monitor
• the electronic system of the city pharmacy
• the electronic system of the regional laboratory

The Decision Module uses ICT standards. Think of protocols such as HL7, ODBC/JDBC, XML and COBRA. It can therefore communicate with any system that supports these standards.

With the editor of the Guideline Module you can enter your own clinical rules quite easily. The editor works intuitively with a drag-and-drop interface. Experience shows that after a short training session, healthcare providers can work with it themselves. We also see that they like to reuse guidelines from other healthcare providers. After all, these can be downloaded. You can simply adapt these guidelines to your own, local working method. The Decision Module (DCS) ensures that your entered guidelines are actually applied.

The Decision Module of Gaston must be linked once by an IT person to the existing information systems. Sometimes one or more links must be developed within the information system. Gaston can always be linked in principle.

The editor of the Guideline Module can be used quite easily after a short training session. The Handling Module is self-explanatory.

When Gaston is set up, the Decision Module ensures the user is warned when a situation that is described in the Guideline Module occurs. The Guideline Module states how this warning should be given. This can be done in various ways, for example:

• in the form of a protocol
• by showing information about a specific disease
• by the appearance of a pop-up
• by sending an email or text message
• by creating a printed overview.

What makes Gaston unique is the Guideline Module. With this you can enter your own guidelines and share them with other Gaston users. This can be done independently of the EPD used. In addition, Gaston is able to learn from previous decisions and has advanced reasoning methods.

This 'learning' ability can significantly reduce the number of Alerts compared to a classic medication monitoring system. This way, Gaston saves you hundreds of general and repeated Alerts, preventing 'signal fatigue' of your care providers and employees, while increasing patient safety at the same time.

Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) can be divided into a basic CDSS and an advanced CDSS. An advanced CDSS, such as Gaston, can reduce the number of irrelevant warnings by more than 95%.

Basic CDSS
Supports the following control mechanisms:

• Drug Interactions
• Allergies
• Dosage control
• (Pseudo)Double medication

Advanced CDSS (Gaston)
Supports the following control mechanisms:

• Drug Interactions
• Allergies
• Double medication: guidance towards the best pharmacotherapy
• Patient characteristics, such as age and gender
• Laboratory values
• Optimal treatment in accordance with our own guidelines.

An advanced CDSS is dynamic. Continuous monitoring takes place based on real-time information. If a parameter changes, this can affect the pharmacotherapy or treatment. The system reports this immediately, for example if kidney function changes or if side effects occur.

In addition, Gaston offers many more possibilities for interaction between patient and care provider, but also between care providers themselves. For example, it can generate questionnaires or send reminders at an appropriate time. Is the indication of the medicine still correct? Or should the patient have stopped taking a medicine a long time ago? Have all laboratory checks been carried out, etc. These are components that are currently not carried out in the standard practice of a care provider (hospital or GP) or at a pharmacy.