There is still an information gap in the medical sector especially between the inhospital and the outpatient area. Based on the results and data of the very successful project PROP, ProPath generalizes the developed approach for software integration of clinical pathways. In addition possible extensions and improvements will be analyzed.
During the last decade, information flow has been growing rapidly. Online platforms with blogs of patients/doctors and databases are available for everyone who has access to the internet. While getting a large amount of information is rather easy, searching for or to better identify reliable sources is quite a big topic in today‘s overflow of data pools. Because of the growing scrutiny of the medical awareness of patients, people request medics, family doctors, etc. to explain the medical process in a very comprehensive way. To encourage this process, the software market tries to adapt.
In the early 60’s, first prototypes of expert systems where implemented in the in as clinical studies. None of these examples were used for a long time period, nor are they still being used. In most cases, the software is too complex for daily routine and needs a lot of handbook knowledge to understand how it works and how it can be used in an optimal way.
The main idea of ProPath is to react on the current situation in medical health care by considering how clinical pathways can be implemented for a variety of medical topics. Both in the outpatient as well as the inhospital area, there is a demand to foster communication and to enforce the distribution of published knowledge and experiences of practical application. Medical expert systems can improve these goals in an easy and nationwide way. The main challenge is to design software which is very user-friendly and to make it implementable in
standard network environments.
ProPath
