Developing data-driven clinical pathways using electronic health records: The cases of total laparoscopic hysterectomy and rotator cuff tears

Objective: A clinical pathway is one of the tools used to support clinical decision making that provides a standardized care process in a specific context. The objective of this research was to develop a method for building data-driven clinical pathways using electronic health record data. Materials and methods: We proposed a matching rate-based clinical pathway mining algorithm that produces the optimal set of clinical orders for each clinical stage by employing matching rates. To validate the approach, we utilized two different datasets of deidentified inpatient records directly related to total laparoscopic hysterectomy (TLH) and rotator cuff tears (RCTs) from a hospital in South Korea. The derived data-driven clinical pathways were evaluated with knowledge-based models by health professionals using a delta analysis. Results: Two different data-driven clinical pathways, i.e., TLH and RCTs, were produced by applying the matching rate-based clinical pathway mining algorithm. We identified that there were significant differences in clinical orders between the data-driven and knowledge-based models. Additionally, the data-driven clinical pathways based on our algorithm outperformed the models by clinical experts, with average matching rates of 82.02% and 79.66%, respectively. Conclusion: The proposed algorithm will be helpful for supporting clinical decisions and directly applicable in medical practices.