Integrated clinical pathways in health information systems - An architectural concept

Abstract

Nowadays Clinical Pathways are used in a number of hospitals in order to control quality and cost of treatment. Clinical Pathways can help to collect knowledge about treatments and to automate some organizational tasks, but only if they are highly integrated into clinical knowledge processing systems. On one hand process management tools are used for modelling and simulation and on the other hand providers of health information systems have begun to integrate pathway support into their systems. But there is still no interchange between these applications and no possibility for different hospitals to share pathway definitions. This paper introduces a concept for sharing Clinical Pathway knowledge among different systems and hospitals. It is intended to be one step towards a common reference architecture. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.