Knowledge-based clinical pathway for medical quality improvement
- Resource Type
- Authors
- Junping Zhang; Kecheng Liu; Hongqiao Yang; Weizi Li
- Source
- Information Systems Frontiers. 14:105-117
- Subject
- Decision support system
Knowledge management
Quality management
Standardization
Computer Networks and Communications
business.industry
Computer science
Medical quality
Medical practice
Theoretical Computer Science
Knowledge-based systems
Clinical pathway
Management system
business
Software
Information Systems
- Language
- ISSN
- 1572-9419
1387-3326
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\ud of clinical pathways is a promising strategy to improve\ud medical quality effectively. However, the clinical pathway\ud 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 knowledgebased clinical pathway management method which contributes to make use of clinical knowledge to support and\ud optimize medical practice. We have developed a knowledgebased 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\ud pathway recommendations with medical tasks and the\ud evaluating pathway deviations for optimization.