Improving pathway compliance and clinician performance by using information technology.

To deliver patient-specific advice at the time and place of a consultation, to improve clinician performance and compliance by using computer-based decision support, and to integrate such IT solutions with the clinical workflow are important strategies for the implementation of clinical pathways. User acceptance plays a critical role: additional effort has to be balanced with enough benefit for the users. Experiences from routine use of an online surgical pathway at Marburg University Medical Center show that it is possible to successfully address this issue by seamlessly integrating patient-specific pat documentation tasks which have to be done anyway and by substantially reusing entered data to accelerate routine tasks (e.g. by automatically generating orders and reports).