Flipping healthcare by including the patient perspective in integrated care pathway design: A scoping review

Despite the recognized benefits of integrating patient perspectives into healthcare design and clinical decision support, theoretical approaches and standardized methods are lacking. Various strategies, such as developing pathways, have evolved to address these challenges. Previous research emphasized the need for a framework for care pathways that includes theoretical principles, extensive user involvement, and data from electronic health records to bridge the gap between different fields and disciplines. Standardizing the representation of the patient perspective could facilitate its sharing across healthcare organizations and domains and its integration into journal systems, shifting the balance of power from the provider to the patient.

This study aims to 1) Identify research approaches taken to develop patient-centred, integrated, care pathways supported by electronic health records 2) Propose a socio-technical framework for designing patient-centred care pathways across multiple healthcare levels that integrates the voice of the patient with the knowledge of the care provider and technological perspectives.

This study conducted a scoping review following the Joanna Briggs Institute guidelines and PRISMA-ScR protocol. The databases PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, ProQuest, IEEE, and Google Scholar were searched using a key term search strategy including variations of patient-centred, integrated care, pathway, framework and model to identify relevant studies. Eligible articles included peer-reviewed literature documenting methodologies for mapping patient-centred, integrated care pathways in healthcare service design.

This review summarizes the application of care pathway modelling practices across various areas of healthcare innovation. The search resulted in 410 studies, with 16 articles included after the full review and grey literature search.

Our research illustrated incorporating patient perspectives into modelling care pathways and healthcare service design. Regardless of the medical domain, our methodology proposes an approach for modelling patient-centred, integrated care pathways across the care continuum, including using electronic health records to support the pathways.