Getting to know clinical care pathways: A basic lesson in supply chain

In healthcare, there’s been a shift toward practicing evidence-based medicine and using data to put together optimal patient outcomes. In this shift, clinical care pathways (CCPs) are valuable tools, as they help hospitals better serve their communities.

When creating CCPs, supply chain data should be included to ensure that clinical, operational, equipment, and supply protocols are determined to drive optimal outcomes. And making the supply chain a part of the CCP creation process helps healthcare systems predict equipment and supply needs for standardized treatment options. Treatments are analyzed, and the data is used to determine which options provide optimal results.

The most successful treatments become standard and are made more easily accessible through a secured supply chain to help hospitals reduce costs while providing the best care to every patient.

How Patients Benefit from CCPs

Physicians may have different ideas concerning a patient’s best treatment path due to their own education and past experiences. Therefore, patients are frequently encouraged to seek multiple opinions before choosing a course of action. In contrast, CCPs pull together the experiences of all local, regional, or national physicians to pinpoint the most effective treatments for particular diagnoses.

The data helps us identify and replicate effective treatment paths from clinical, operational, and financial perspectives, including what types of environments, supplies, and products provide the best patient outcomes. Patients benefit from this evidence-based approach because they can rest assured that their treatments have already been proven effective with data to support them. Health systems also benefit because the entire process is standardized and more cost-effective to implement.

Health Systems Benefit From Involving the Supply Chain

When creating CCPs, we typically look at two different paths: the evaluation pathway and the post-op pathway. The evaluation pathway is the process of determining what the best treatment is for patients based on their specific diagnoses. The post-op pathway determines the best treatment options for the patient after surgery, such as what medication, medical equipment, or physical therapy is needed for a successful recovery.

Both of these pathways, as well as the operative pathway, should be reviewed from a supply chain perspective. From the supply chain perspective, the supplies needed for different products, such as implants, should be analyzed with the rest of the data to determine whether they more frequently lead to favorable outcomes for patients. For instance, do the implants allow patients to return to work or other activities sooner? Do patients exhibit increased flexibility or function where the implant was placed? Or, more subjectively, what pain levels do patients report after receiving the implants?

Such data allows the supply chain to influence the creation of clinical pathways and gives healthcare systems the power to provide clinically proven treatments for all patients.

Supply Chain’s Impact on CCPs

When analyzing supply chain data, the committee tasked with creating CCPs will determine whether there are trends of particular products more often leading to favorable outcomes. If products do show favorable trends, clinicians will investigate them further by looking into studies of the products to find out why. If no trends are determined, the products used will be commoditized in theory, and the supply chain can work with clinicians to standardize their utilization while contracting with the standard supplier to secure the best pricing.

Once supply chain data is available and included in the data set, the committee can create care protocols for different diagnoses more efficiently. The analysis will show the committee whether particular supplies should be included in certain CCPs and how the healthcare system can reduce costs by incorporating supply chain protocols into them.

Photo: Flickr user tv’s Spatch

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