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Using Recommendation to Support Adaptive Clinical Pathways

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Abstract

Clinical pathways are among the main tools used to manage the quality in health-care concerning the standardization of care processes. This paper deals with a recommendation service to support adaptive clinical pathways. The proposed approach can guide physicians in clinical pathways by providing recommendations on possible next steps based on the measurement of the target patient status and medical knowledge from completed clinical cases. The efficiency and usability of the proposed method is validated by experiments referring to a real data set extracted from Electronic Patient Records. The experimental results indicate that the recommendation service can provide its users with advice rationales that remain consistent even when patient status has changed. This makes adaptive clinical pathways possible.

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Acknowledgements

The author is especially thankful to the endocrinology department of Chinese Huzhou Center hospital for the positive support despite their hard work, and more particularly to all medical staff involved.

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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Correspondence to Xudong Lu.

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Huang, Z., Lu, X. & Duan, H. Using Recommendation to Support Adaptive Clinical Pathways. J Med Syst 36, 1849–1860 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-010-9644-3

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