Clinical Pathway Enhanced by Knowledge Management Technology: A Critical Step towards Medical Quality Improvement

Clinical pathways are complex processes based on knowledge and personal experience, which are essential for high quality patient treatment. However, the insufficient knowledge coverage and representation for detailed clinical pathways makes it difficult to provide accurate information to improve patient safety. The gap between the dynamic practical treatment process and the predefined clinical pathways knowledge becomes an important issue. This chapter discusses how knowledge management enhances the implementation of clinical pathway to achieve medical quality improvement. The relationship between patient safety and the effectiveness of clinical pathway knowledge is discussed. The clinical pathway knowledge management pattern is derived in the context of healthcare knowledge management. More specifically, a norm-based approach is proposed to represent and manage clinical pathway knowledge. Types of knowledge can be represented comprehensively with the taxonomy of norms as useful building blocks to construct the dynamic and accurate clinical pathway knowledge. The multi-agent system embedded with norms is developed to enhance clinical pathway management in the context of complicated healthcare environment. Finally, social-technical issues of implementing knowledge management technologies in practical treatment process are discussed.