Clinical pathways
Medical processes in clinical facilities are characterised by their high complexity and variability. The reasons for this include: patient individuality, the treating staff, the devices and systems employed as well as the differing treatment strategies. This leads to the situation that therapies applied to identical clinical pictures and prognoses are needlessly subject to great variations.
Nevertheless, in an attempt to guarantee optimised clinical conformity in regards to the treatment result, clinical pathways (a.k.a. critical pathways) and Standard Operating Procedures (SOP's) were defined on the basis of medical guidelines. These pathways reflect the path to the best possible therapy result for a particular clinical picture in accordance with current knowledge (state of the art). What is more, the strict process orientation of clinical therapies offers potential for optimisation of the clinical resources utilised.
It has been explicitly proven in international studies that clinical pathways are associated with a significantly lower complication rate in the hospital and with better documentation. Patients who were treated according to standardised processes were able to be released from the hospital earlier and cost the hospitals significantly less on a per-case basis depending on the initial status. (source: Press release from IDW Information Service 2010 (Informationsdiensts Wissenschaft))
The introduction, implementation and monitoring of conformity with clinical pathways is frequently very difficult to describe due to the complexity and variability in the medical fields.
SWAN - Scientific Workflow Analysis GmbH (s.w.an) offers you:
- Support during introduction of clinical pathways
- Support during formulation, modelling and implementation of in-house clinical pathways
- Compliancy check of existing facility-specific pathways (in comparison of medical guidelines of professional societies)
Our procedure:
SWAN - Scientific Workflow Analysis GmbH works with a methodology for process data recording which was especially developed for the medical field. This software-aided methodology enables the individual acquisition and analysis of clinical pathways as well as integration of the variability that is so characteristic of medical processes. In this way, unnecessary and cost intensive deviations from existing clinical pathways can be identified and minimised - even in very complicated treatment processes. The methodology is supported by the establishment of key process indicators and the creation of process models. These are particularly useful for checking internal implementation of guidelines.
When creating treatment guidelines or SOP's, s.w.an supports its clients sby modelling and adaptation of medical guidelines to the specific requirements of the clinical facility. To that end, the company workflows relevant to the medical guidelines will be analyzed in detail and translated into facility-specific clinical pathways. These pathways contain a catalog of measures compiled for the continuous enhancement and improvement of internal processes. Moreover, it can be used as a didactic resource of information for in-house introductions.
Your benefits:
- Results-oriented optimisation of the treatment procedure
(state of the art) - Guarantee of a constantly high treatment quality level
- Increases the treatment reliability and legal security of clinical personnel
- Improvement of work conditions for physicians, nursing staff and employees having patient contact
- Reduction of per-case costs
- Avoidance of process detours and deadends
- Shortening of treatment times and waiting times
- Optimisation of resources utilised
- Reduction of resources used for documentation