Clinical pathways have been adopted for various diseases in clinical departments for quality improvement as a result of standardization of medical activities in treatment process. Using knowledge-based decision support on the basisudof clinical pathways is a promising strategy to improveudmedical quality effectively. However, the clinical pathwayudknowledge has not been fully integrated into treatment process and thus cannot provide comprehensive support to the actual work practice. Therefore this paper proposes a knowledgebased clinical pathway management method which contributes to make use of clinical knowledge to support andudoptimize medical practice. We have developed a knowledgebased clinical pathway management system to demonstrate how the clinical pathway knowledge comprehensively supports the treatment process. The experiences from the use of this system show that the treatment quality can be effectively improved by the extracted and classified clinical pathway knowledge, seamless integration of patient-specific clinicaludpathway recommendations with medical tasks and theudevaluating pathway deviations for optimization.
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