Care pathway workbench: evidence harmonization from guideline and data.

Care pathways (CPs) as a means of healthcare quality control are getting increasing attention due to widespread recognition in the healthcare industry of the need for well coordinated, evidence based and personalized care. To keep the promise, CPs require continuous refinement in order to stay up to date with regard to both clinical guidelines and data-driven insights from real world practices. There is therefore a strong demand for a unified platform that allows harmonization of evidence coming from multiple sources. In this paper we describe Care Pathway Workbench, a web-based platform that enables users to build and continuously improve Case Management Model and Notation based CPs by harmonizing evidences from guidelines and patient data. To illustrate the functionalities, we describe how a CHF (Congestive Heart Failure) Ambulatory Care Pathway can be developed using this workbench by first extracting key elements from widely accepted guidelines for CHF management, then incorporating evidence mined from clinical practice data, and finally transforming and exporting the resulting CP model to a care management product.