Clinical Care Pathways (CPW) are complex interventions with standardized care process for well-defined groups of patients, during a specifically defined period to time. CPWs are an effective way to improve patient safety and quality of care. They were first introduced in the late 1980’s in response to the introduction of Diagnosis Related Groups(DRGs) in 1983 (Panella et al 2012). There are several trends impacted by Care Pathways which include reduction of length of stay and hospital cost, improvement of patient outcomes and professional practice. There are positive as well as negative results in clinical, service, and financial outcomes. There has been extensive evaluation of care pathways on acute hospital settings, however the focus…show more content… It is a multidisciplinary team approach, and requires participation from all involved to make it a successful process. Members include hospital leadership, nursing, rehabilitation services, pharmacy, physicians, information technology, and ancillary staff. Characteristic of the care path include a statement of goal, and key elements based on evidence, patient expectations and best practices, the communication among team members, patients, and family members, coordination of the process, sequencing activities of the team, documentation, monitoring, and evaluation of outcomes and variances, as well as, identification of resourced…show more content… There are positive as well as negative results in clinical, financial, and service outcomes. Based on research conducted, including 23 studies involving, 11,98 participants, comparing CPWs to usual care, there was a reduction in in-hospital complication, improved documentation, there was no evidence of the differences in readmission to hospital or in-hospital mortality, although there was a decrease in length of stay, and hospital costs over usual care, favoring CPWs (Rotter et al 2010). There needs to be more research to evaluate care pathways. One example noted, there should be cluster randomized control trials to evaluate the impact of care pathways on performance of care process, clinical outcomes, and teamwork when treating patients with different conditions to help us understand the effectiveness of care pathways (Panella et al 2012). An accepted design to guide the reorganization of healthcare delivery systems from acute and reactive care to proactive, planned, and community-based care, is the Chronic Care Model (CCM). To better integrate aspects of prevention and health promotion into the CCM, an improved version called the Expanded Chronic Care Model was developed. The CCM has been used widely, however, implementation has been shown to be fragmented and limited to one or two components, mostly multidisciplinary teamwork,
