Development of a Hospital Service That Uses Critical Pathway (Protocolized) Care Plans to Provide High-Quality, High-Reliability, Evidence-Based Medical Care

Our broad, long-term objective is to create a new non-resident (non-teaching) hospital service that uses patient-centered critical pathway care plans for treating patients in St. Marys Hospital. This innovative service, the Hospital Medicine (HOME) Team, will integrate three timely, high-priority concepts in healthcare: patient-centered quality care, evidence-based medicine, and principles that define high reliability organizations. The target populations for the new model of service are patients hospitalized with pre-defined admission diagnoses who are expected to require only a brief, focused hospital stay of four days or less. Specifically, we will 1) Design the prototypical approach to be used for developing all critical pathway care plans by integrating patient-centered quality care, evidence-based medicine, and principles that define high reliability organizations, 2) Systematically design the critical pathway care plans for two pre-defined admission diagnoses (community-acquired pneumonia and non-surgical low-back pain), and 3) Compare outcomes of this new service against respective historical patient cohorts for patients admitted with community-acquired pneumonia and non-surgical low-back pain. We anticipate that the prototypic methodology used to develop this patient-centered service will be replicated for other new hospital-service models. To our knowledge, there are currently no existing hospital services in the U.S. that have intentionally integrated principles of high reliability organizations into evidence-based critical pathways founded on patient-centered principles of uncompromising quality.