What is a Clinical Pathway?
A clinical pathway is a structured, evidence-based, multidisciplinary plan that details steps in the care of patients with a specific condition. The goal of a clinical pathway is to standardize best practice, improve patient outcomes and reduce cost. This is accomplished by decreasing unnecessary variation while promoting safe, effective, and consistent patient care.
Our Program
The Clinical Pathways Program at Connecticut Children’s aims to improve the quality of care our patients receive, across both ambulatory and acute care settings. We have implemented a standardized process for clinical pathway development and maintenance to ensure meaningful improvements to patient care as well as systematic continual improvement.
Development of a clinical pathway includes a multidisciplinary team, which may include doctors, advanced practitioners, nurses, pharmacists, other specialists, and even patients/families. Each clinical pathway has a flow algorithm, an educational module for end-user education, associated order set(s) in the electronic medical record, and quality metrics that are evaluated regularly to measure the pathway’s effectiveness. Additionally, clinical pathways are reviewed annually and updated to ensure alignment with the most up to date evidence.