Clinical Pathways for Total Joint Arthroplasty: Essential Components for Success

Clinical Pathways: An Overview The term clinical pathway refers to a multidisciplinary process of mutual decision-making that results in the organized care of a well-defined group of patients during a well-defined period of time.[1, 2] Clinical pathways were first introduced in the 1980’s when escalating medical costs pressured physicians to decrease resource utilization without jeopardizing patient safety or clinical outcomes. At that time, pathways were typically procedure-specific (e.g., coronary artery bypass grafting, total knee arthroplasty) and tailored to a specific institution.[3, 4] As a result, tremendous variability often existed from one institutional clinical pathway to another, making clinical comparisons between pathways and formal scientific study exceedingly difficult.