Clinical pathways: how doctors treat patients.
I’ve been assigned a new project as part of the UCLA initiative for all web content by the university to become more “web compliant” and accessible. Yet again, this is a classic case of an institution having accessibility as a check-box rather than something that was built in from the start so I have my work cut out for me–but I think this will end up being pretty cool and an interesting opportunity to upgrade how medical students at David Geffen School of Medicine access information on-call at the training hospital.
Above is a wireframe I started working on for the SCAN pathway (Suspected Child Abuse and Neglect) – dealing with mandated reporting in Pediatrics and resources available for the doctors and nurses to reference. Clinical pathways currently only exist as unreadable and inaccessible PDFs that load very slowly due to the amount of pages that exist…the hospital itself does have fast wifi but it is no good when the uploads themselves are resource-heavy and there’s a WHOLE library of pathways for almost every condition you can think of.
So to start, I went ahead and asked for the most common pathways that are referenced as of late (mostly related to flu, ventilator weaning, sepsis, BPD in the NICU, and anaphylaxis as there’s been recent updates in the literature and care standards) as the first couple pathways to try and adapt to a more web-friendly version.
Why a website? Of course we can have the graphics to print out for display in the ED, but this would be helpful to students that primarily study nowadays using online text, podcasts, and recorded lectures. If they can pull up linked resources from PubMed, they can see updates to literature in real-time when rounding or right before a test, or just to double-check details with their attending before treating a patient.
From my landscape review–it’s interesting to note that not many institutions make these clinical pathway resources public. I assume it is due to HIPAA but if these are general treatment plans and evidence-based on current studies & best practice, why not keep it easy to access for medical students? CHOP (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia) is leading in that regard by having a searchable database and the actual pathways adapted in simple HTML/CSS and Javascript.
I’m excited to embark on this new project and to collaborate with the Pediatric Division Chiefs to learn more about how new best practices are incorporated at the bedside, how they teach students, and to work on something that is going to be huge as a resource.
