Abstract
This study shows an improvement of the critical pathway operation at the Shonai Amarume Hospital by actively involving the health information manager in the critical pathway committee, which originally included only physicians, nurses and co-medical staff. During the first two years of his participation, the health information manager was involved only partially, however during the latter two years, the health information manager got involved extensively in the maintenance of the management regulations and variances' regulations.
As a result, the management system of the critical pathway was unified including all departments at the hospital. A LAN system nowadays enables a printout of the management rules and the critical pathway forms from anywhere in the hospital. Patients' critical pathway data was integrated into the patients' clinical database. Through this, instead of the original 6, 51 patients' data could be accumulated. Additionally, the variances' regulations were newly established and clinically applied, resulting in a significant increase of the ratio of variances' numbers for each critical pathway (p<0.05, χ2 test). By analyzing the variances, several changes were added to the critical pathway, which resulted in a significant decrease in the negative consequences of variances (p<0.05, χ2 test).
