Patient Pathways for Comprehensive Care Networks - A Development Method and Lessons from its Application in Oncology Care

Patient pathways are recognized as a valuable tool to support standardization, comparability, quality, and transparency of care processes in comprehensive care networks. Still, existing development approaches lack real practical guidance as well as an integration of the network and patient perspectives. Therefore, a user-centered and requirements-based approach was chosen to design a patient pathway development method. It defines a role model and procedural steps. The method’s innovative character lies in the development of generic patient pathway templates to be adapted to national, regional, and local conditions of specific comprehensive care networks. The method was positively assessed in terms of demonstrating its applicability and the fulfilment of user requirements with a use case from oncology care – the development of a colorectal cancer patient pathway template. This work drives the standardization of patient pathway development and their large-scale implementation in comprehensive care networks, supporting the analysis, design, and optimization of healthcare processes