Reference Concept Map

About a month ago I wrote a post with the title "What is a care pathway?" and gave one definition for a care pathway and its synonyms (clinical-, critical, integrated care pathway, and care map). However, I was not pleased with this because I still didn’t know what was meant by it. So I kept looking for other definitions, and found some more.

I kept looking for other definitions, and eventually I found 15 different definitions. I wanted to compare these definitions, so I rephrased each definition into my own words, using the same blocks of words. This resulted in 15 different definitions, all defining a type of pathway using more or less the same words. To be able to compare them I made a Reference Concept Map. A Reference Concept Map (RCM) shows a new definition of one central concept (pathway in this case), using the 15 rephrased references. The path with the most common word blocks will form a new definition. The Reference Concept Map I made is shown in figure 1.

Figure 1 - Reference Concept Map (click for larger image)

The definition that results from this RCM is: A care pathway is a description of a care process from an organization point of view for a specific disease and for a specific (group of) patient(s). The description is based on evidence and on (clinical) guidelines and it, is designed to improve efficiency and improve patient outcomes.

As you can see I chose to use the term care pathway in the definition. I have done this because of two reasons. The first reason is that the E-P-A (European Pathway Association) advises to use this term because the other terms may be confusing in different languages. The second reason is the frequency it is used in the 15 references I used to make the RCM. It is used 8 out of 15 times, which is the third most occurring term.

So I added another definition to the many already existing definitions. ‘Useless’, you might think, but think again. I didn’t come up with a new definition; I used the many existing definitions, added them together, mixed them up and gave a definition comprising all important elements of the existing definitions. I did this to gain more clarity about the various terms and to investigate whether they were defined as synonyms or not. The conclusion from this is that most of the terms like clinical pathway, critical pathway, etc. can be seen as synonyms.