Care mapping: a common sense approach

Because of trends in the health care environment, hospitals are searching for ways to continuously improve the quality of care and to decrease the costs of care. One approach that is gaining widespread recognition throughout the United States is the use of case management and practice guidelines such as critical paths, CareMaps, and in the neonatal field, NeoMaps. The NeoMap is a clinical tool which delineates practice guidelines for each discipline that provide care to a specific infant population. It reduces variation in clinical process and thereby has been shown to improve the quality of infant care. When practice guidelines are linked to both health and economic outcomes, they have significant impact on health care costs. In this paper, case management and the development of the NeoMap will be described in relation to the Intensive Care Nursery (ICN) at Pennsylvania Hospital.