BACKGROUND Changes that improve the quality of health care should be sustained. Falling back to old, unsatisfactory ways of working is a waste of resources and can in the worst case increase resistance to later initiatives to improve care. Quality improvement relies on changing the clinical system yet factors that influence the sustainability of quality improvements are poorly understood. Theor...

The efficient storage of medical knowledge is critical for the advancement of medicine; a flexible platform for the storage of knowledge is the need of the hour. Therefore, this work focuses on clinical pathways—tools that effectively maintain the quality and control the cost of medicine—to formulate a model for knowledge storage. In this work, ontology was employed as the fundamental theory to...

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES The objective of this study was to show the usefulness of lean six sigma (LSS) for the development of a multidisciplinary clinical pathway. METHODS A single centre, both retrospective and prospective, non-randomized controlled study design was used to identify the variables of a prolonged length of stay (LOS) for hip fractures in the elderly and to measure the effect of th...

PURPOSE Our previous study indicated that there was a great variety in the perioperative management of radical prostatectomy among hospitals. Therefore we conducted a multiinstitutional study in order to standardize the perioperative management using clinical pathways. MATERIALS AND METHODS The perioperative data on radical prostatectomy were collected between January and December 2004 (Perio...

Objective: To evaluate the effect of the pattern of clinical pathway management upon the healthcare nursing for patients who were diagnosed with malignant tumors. Methods: A total of 186 intern nurses were recruited and randomly divided into the control (n=90) and clinical pathway groups (n=96). In the control group, all the intern nurses received traditional teaching management, and their coun...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE There are significant differences in the provision of care and outcome after stroke across countries. The European Registers of Stroke study aimed to develop, test, and refine a tool to assess quality of care. METHODS We used a systematic review and grading of evidence for stroke care across the clinical pathway and developed and field-tested a quality tool that was del...

Schedule management of hospitalization is important to maintain or improve the quality of medical care and application of a clinical pathway is one of the important solutions for the management. Although several kinds of deductive methods for construction for a clinical pathway have been proposed, the customization is one of the important problems. This research proposed an inductive approach t...

A critical or clinical pathway defines the optimal care process, sequencing and timing of interventions by doctors, nurses and other health care professionals for a particular diagnosis or procedure. Clinical pathways are developed through collaborative efforts of clinicians, case managers, nurses, pharmacists, physiotherapists and other allied health care professionals with the aim of improvin...

OBJECTIVE Clinical pathways (CPs) have been viewed as a multidisciplinary tool to improve the quality and efficiency of evidence-based care. Despite widespread enthusiasm for CPs, research has shown that many CP initiatives are unsuccessful. To this end, this study provides a methodology to evaluate critical success factors (CSFs) that can aid healthcare organizations to achieve successful CP i...