Mining clinical pathway based on clustering and feature selection

Abstract

Schedule management of hospitalization is important to maintain or improve the quality of medical care and application of a clinical pathway is one of the important solutions for the management. This research proposed an data-oriented maintenance of existing clinical pathways by using data on histories of nursing orders. If there is no clinical pathway for a given disease, the method will induce a new clinical care plan from the data. The method was evaluated on 10 diseases. The results show that the reuse of stored data will give a powerful tool for management of nursing schedule and lead to improvement of hospital services. © Springer International Publishing 2013.