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Knowledge-based clinical pathway for medical quality improvement

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Abstract

Clinical pathways have been adopted for various diseases in clinical departments for quality improvement as a result of standardization of medical activities in treatment process. Using knowledge-based decision support on the basis of clinical pathways is a promising strategy to improve medical quality effectively. However, the clinical pathway knowledge has not been fully integrated into treatment process and thus cannot provide comprehensive support to the actual work practice. Therefore this paper proposes a knowledge-based clinical pathway management method which contributes to make use of clinical knowledge to support and optimize medical practice. We have developed a knowledge-based clinical pathway management system to demonstrate how the clinical pathway knowledge comprehensively supports the treatment process. The experiences from the use of this system show that the treatment quality can be effectively improved by the extracted and classified clinical pathway knowledge, seamless integration of patient-specific clinical pathway recommendations with medical tasks and the evaluating pathway deviations for optimization.

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Notes

  1. A hospital information system (HIS), is a comprehensive, integrated information system designed to manage the administrative and financial aspects of a hospital. Clinical information systems (CISs) are sometimes separated from HISs in that the former concentrate on patient-related and clinical-state-related data (electronic patient record) whereas the latter keeps track of administrative issues.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hospital 309 of People’s Liberation Army, Beijing, China

    Hongqiao Yang

  2. School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China

    Weizi Li & Kecheng Liu

  3. Informatics Research Centre, University of Reading, Reading, UK

    Kecheng Liu

  4. Carefx Corporation, Scottsdale, AZ, USA

    Junping Zhang

Authors
  1. Hongqiao Yang
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  2. Weizi Li
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  3. Kecheng Liu
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  4. Junping Zhang
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Correspondence to Weizi Li.

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Yang, H., Li, W., Liu, K. et al. Knowledge-based clinical pathway for medical quality improvement. Inf Syst Front 14, 105–117 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-011-9307-z

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