Clinical Pathways are evidence-based clinical guidelines for patients with similar diagnoses that when applied aid in the coordination and delivery of high-quality care to improve patient outcomes while containing costs. Clinical Pathway tools and concepts incorporate patient centered best practices and protocols that are customized and locally defined.

In our latest webinar, Lead Consultants Rebecca Matias & Laura Gold share their practical experiences and expertise in deploying Clinical Pathways within the EHR. Rebecca and Laura summarize the fundamental concepts of standardized clinical process leading to improved patient care, highlight leadership approaches of cross-functional team collaboration, and touch on the role of technology in sustained improved patient outcomes. A demonstration of Clinical Pathway configuration within the EHR is also provided.

View the recorded webinar, slides, Q&A and case study below to learn about considerations and practical steps leading to successful adoption of Clinical Pathways for your organization.

Webcast Recording

Slides

Q&A

Q: Our EHR has embedded Clinical Decision Support as part of our MU2 requirements a few years ago. Is that the same thing?

A: They are not. They are a small portion of what we try to leverage in a pathway. You want to think of the clinical decision support as hard stops or small flags. We certainly leverage a much larger standard of care when doing a full pathway.

Q: You spoke briefly about selecting CP’s. Since you have seen a lot of clients, can you talk about what pathways are they using? Also how did they choose or prioritize which ones to do first?

A: Prioritization and selection was done by reviewing and identifying areas where patients were showing up for specialty care or testing without the proper testing or orders, or they were over-tested. As far as which pathways that we’ve seen utilized, diabetes is really high up there. Hypertension and  anything related to COPD are also highly utilized. The most traction was with addressing the opioid crisis. This was done by setting up parameters for acute and chronic care and pain evaluation and treatment in the primary care setting. Another that was popular was antibiotic treatment in the  pediatric population, specifically around sore throats and upper respiratory infection.

Q: When you roll out the clinical pathways, providers can be affected by alert fatigue. How do you get past that in terms of training the providers?

A: In the planning phases, you must engage the providers. This is an initiative where they have a lot of choice. As an analyst, an alert may seem important, but to a provider, it may be something they are going to do anyways. You want to gather that feedback. If you are doing risk-based contracting and there is some area that the clinical review board wants to concentrate on, that might be the situation to manifest an alert. You need to make sure to put that in your education and let them know why you are going to leverage that type of tool. Keep in mind, that with pathway build, if you can take any initiatives that you are already participating in, incorporating those into pathway is one less place providers have to go look.

Case Study