Clinical Pathways: Identifying Development, Implementation and Evaluation Challenges

Clinical pathways are comprehensive methods of planning, delivering and monitoring different healthcare services provided to patients. The main goal of using a clinical pathway is to build clinical decisions on medical evidence specific to each individual patient in addition to standardizing care provided to patients throughout different departments and healthcare services. At King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center, Saudi Arabia, much effort has been done over the last few years to develop, implement and evaluate different clinical pathways and for years these efforts achieved less than expected success. The Health Information Technology Affairs (HITA) decided to analyze the challenges that we faced and should overcome by working on identifying these challenges and classifying them into the three main stages. The information about these challenges were both gathered from relevant departments, services and staff members as well as validated against published literature and research work.