Our Story

Clinical Branches was born from a simple recognition: busy healthcare professionals need clinical decision support that integrates seamlessly into their workflow. Our journey began in antimicrobial stewardship, where the gap between best-practice guidelines and point-of-care reality was particularly acute.

Today, Clinical Branches serves more than 72 hospitals across Australia and Canada, but the path to get here taught us invaluable lessons about what truly works in healthcare software.

Healthcare facilities face common challenges: high staff turnover, multiple sites to cover, and no systematic way to identify which patients need review. Traditional approaches through written procedures, laminated reference cards, posters in drug rooms consistently failed to impact prescribing behaviour when decisions are made, on ward rounds and clinic visits.

Budget constraints meant commercial solutions were often out of reach, particularly for regional facilities. Something had to change.

The first breakthrough came from combining pathology and medication data in Excel. Using macros to identify antibiotic interactions, drug-bug mismatches, and dosing issues against renal function, stewardship teams could suddenly see problems across all their hospitals.

This reactive approach significantly increased intervention rates and had measurable impacts on antimicrobial usage. But it was still just fixing problems after they occurred. The real opportunity was at the point of prescribing.

Multiple traditional approaches were tested and measured:

• Hospital procedures and guidelines: Opened only a handful of times, with no measurable change in practice
• Laminated reference cards: Infection control concerns made these impractical, they were rarely used
• Posters in drug rooms: Too late in the workflow. Prescribing decisions happen during ward rounds, they have already happened in the drug room
• Training programs: Gains lost quickly due to staff turnover and limited education slots

The pattern was clear: guidance needed to be fast, mobile, and integrated into the clinical workflow at the moment of decision-making.

A basic web application was developed based on the Australian Therapeutic Guidelines. It guided clinicians through a series of questions to identify the right therapy, included treatment tips, and provided dosing calculators for vancomycin and gentamicin. Speed was the critical factor. Clinicians could get answers in under a minute.

The results were immediate and measurable. Historically high usage of certain broad-spectrum antibiotics dropped to record lows. Emergency department physicians, notoriously difficult to please, voted it the most usable and useful clinical decision support tool available.

The platform won multiple awards and, more importantly, demonstrated that digital decision support could actually change prescribing behaviour at the point of care.

The early success led to releasing both the spreadsheet tools and digital pathways as open-source solutions. At its peak, 15 hospitals were using the open-source platform, with impressive results emerging across different sites.

These results validated the approach and demonstrated that effective clinical decision support doesn't require massive budgets, it requires an understanding of clinical workflows.

While successful, the open-source project revealed limitations. Each site customized their pathways, creating maintenance challenges as staff rotated. Users needed more functionality: proper audit capabilities, the ability to update pathways without accessing source code, patient prioritization features, and enterprise-grade security.

Clinical Branches was built from the ground up to address these needs. The platform maintains the speed and usability that made the original tool successful while adding:

• AI-assisted pathway creation from guideline documents
• Machine learning and relational rule guided patient prioritisation and dosage pattern matching
• EMR integration for seamless workflow
• ISO 27001/27017 certified security

Most importantly, Clinical Branches preserves what made the original tool work: it's fast, intuitive, and designed around the reality of clinical workflows.