There are so many clinical practice guidelines for so many clinical disorders circulating around us every day, it is tough to follow any of them, let alone a particular one, given how busy we are and how often we fail to take the time to see if such a guideline exists (and there are a lot of them). So are there any benefits in creating evidence-based clinical care pathways if we aren’t going to use them?Lion et al. (10.1542/peds.2015-1202) decided to look specifically at 15 inpatient clinical pathways designed for common health conditions at one tertiary care children’s hospital over a 5-year period. The authors looked at average cost of hospitalization, length of stay and readmission rate pre and post implementation of the pathways. As you might expect, when compliance with a pathway was stressed at this particular hospital, costs decreased per patient, length of stay decreased, and there was not an increased rate of readmission.
While we realize you cannot necessarily be aware of all existing care pathways, the use of an EHR can certainly alert you to those your office or hospital would like to use, and even following just one—will likely improve the quality of your care while reducing costs to the system. To further add insight into why this article is so important, we have included a commentary from quality and safety expert Dr. Stephen Lawless (10.1542/peds.2015-4164) that adds to the take-away lessons from reading this study. Make a pathway to both the study and commentary and learn more.
