Handling Time Constraints in Infection Clinical Pathways Using openEHR TP

Abstract

Clinical Pathways (CP) provide healthcare personnel with an easy-to-understand high level model of medical steps in specific patient conditions, thereby improving overall process quality in clinical practice. The emergence of new clinical-oriented standards such as openEHR Task Planning (TP) could pose a major step towards clinical process improvement, particularly in complex domains such as infection diagnosis and treatment, where time plays a critical role. In this work, we analyze the suitability of TP to successfully represent time constraints of common process patterns in infections, modelling some of the Catheter-Related Blood Stream Infection (CR-BSI) process patterns as a case study. Our research shows that TP is useful to represent time constraints of infection CPs, although minor improvements could increase its suitability not only for infection processes but for other time-related complex clinical scenarios.