On the “pathway” towards ICT-support for a better and sustainable healthcare

Abstract

This paper focuses on clinical pathways, a tool that physicians are introducing to support the management of patients’ illness trajectories. We undertook a six months long observational study in an intensive care unit of an important Italian teaching hospital and we acknowledged with physicians the importance of relying on well-agreed and properly defined clinical pathways in daily care practice. As a result of this study, we propose a roadmap on how to participatorily design a computer-based system supporting practitioners’ decisions on the basis of the integration between clinical data and the indications reported in clinical pathways.