A clinical pathway defines the optimal care process, sequencing and timing of interventions by doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals for a particular diagnosis or procedure. It is a relatively new clinical process improvement tool that has been gaining popularity across hospitals in the USA, Australia and United Kingdom. Clinical pathways are developed through collaborative efforts...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this article is to report on the quality of the existing evidence base regarding the effectiveness of clinical pathway (CPW) research in the hospital setting. The analysis is based on a recently published Cochrane review of the effectiveness of CPWs. METHODS An integral component of the review process was a rigorous appraisal of the methodological quality of publishe...

INTRODUCTION The distinctive characteristics of the German health system are medical progress and financial pressure-and this is especially true of the hospitals. These challenges must be met by strategic management instruments for quality assurance, and by reducing costs. PURPOSE This article presents the instrument "clinical pathway" (also known as "clinical treatment pathway") and describe...

BACKGROUND A clinical pathway support system on the Internet (CPSSI) has been designed for creating and implementing a web-based clinical pathway for radical prostatectomy. This investigation assessed the effects of the web-based clinical pathway for radical prostatectomy on practice variations. METHODS From June 2002 to Jun 2003, 22 consecutive patients with localized prostate cancer who und...

Interferons (IFNs) are a family of small regulatory glycoproteins that play a central role in the defense against viral infections. Although IFNs have been initially discovered as antiviral factors, today they are known as an integral part of the cytokine network that affect a wide range of biological processes. IFNs exert their pleiotropic effects through their multisubunit cell surface recept...

Clinical pathways are increasingly being used internationally as a mechanism for managing patient care to achieve improved outcomes with more efficient resource use. They are a structured templates guiding multi-professional treatment and care for specific patient groups or procedures, through a sequence of essential treatment and care steps based on the best available evidence. This paper defi...

The primary objective of clinical pathways is to improve the quality of healthcare and to reduce variations and costs, however they also have the potential to be used as an efÞ cient learning resource. Their introduction can help medical professionals to keep their knowledge up-to-date and to better learn their roles and responsibilities in a hospital. >>mipp> is a clinical pathway project unde...