Facilitating care management through computerized clinical pathways

The development and implementation of clinical pathways at New York University Medical Center and the transition to a computerized multidisciplinary documentation system took place between 1995 and 1998. Both the computerized system and the pathway program evolved simultaneously over this 3-year period. The article describes the process of creating the clinical pathways and the automated documentation system to support the clinical pathways. Migration from the paper pathway to the automated system required the efforts of an interdisciplinary team, which focused on issues such as translation of written pathway detail into language that could be loaded into the automated system. The advantages, pitfalls, and lessons learned in this integration experience are also described.