An approach to using care pathway records for research

Previously, we have examined the use of integrated care pathways, a fine-grained form of medical guideline including the explicit recording of any deviation, or 'variance', for research purposes. Feeding the results of the analysis of variance into the development of a pathway could be an effective way of capturing evidence from practice. Building on this concept, in our principal case study we propose a system for extracting data from integrated care pathways (ICPs) using ontologies and a method for inferring ICPs from other patient records, combining these with data collected for retrospective and prospective studies in preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) for assisted reproduction.