The optimization of a surgical clinical pathway

A Clinical Pathway (CP) can be conceived as an algorithm based on a flow chart that details all decisions and treatments related to a patient with a given pathology. CPs can be considered an operational tool in the clinical treatment of diseases, from a patient-focused point of view. Although it has been shown their benefits in clinical practices, little attention has been dedicated to study how CP can optimize the use of resources. We focus our attention on the analysis of a surgical CP from a patient-centred point of view in order to optimize the most critical resources of a surgical CP, and to evaluate the impact of the optimization with respect to a set of patient- and facility-centred indices.