Assessing Methods to Model Patient-Centric Care Pathways across Multiple Healthcare Systems

Clinical pathways have been promoted to maximize care coordination. Over the last decade, they have developed into patient-centric pathways, including the patient's needs and expectations of future health care. Integrated patient-centric pathways facilitate and encourage the coordination between multiple levels of care. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) contain information that could support integrated, patient-centric pathways. This paper aims to identify the challenges of modelling patient-centric pathways spanning primary and specialist care and provide guidelines for meeting those challenges. The study results show the lack of a standard definition of an integrated, patient-centric pathway and the various methods used to describe them. Finally, the study provides recommendations for a new approach for modelling EHR-supported, patient-centric pathways across the care continuum.