Our Care Pathway Approach
Care pathways are a way of mapping a patient’s progress through a healthcare system. A patient’s healthcare journey today often means navigating a network of healthcare professionals, many of whom may not even work for the same institutions. Without some way to track and identify their progress through that network, physicians would have a hard time arranging care coordination or even ensuring their patient receives the right care at the right time.
That’s why care pathways are becoming such an important part of healthcare. By providing physicians an evidence-based protocol to follow — informed by the successes and failures of past treatments, readily revised when new data presents itself — they can blunt the impact of volatility and reduce costs. Volatility is one of the greatest culprits behind the cost of healthcare, as different patients respond unexpectedly to unanticipated fluctuations in their treatment.
Care pathways, on the other hand, provide physicians with:
- More informed decision-making
- Standardized healthcare protocols
- Consistency across each milestone of the patient journey
Pathways don’t completely remove volatility from the equation, but they do reduce its impact on the system. In doing so, the quality of patient care rises. They can increase the efficiency of care, provide an educated framework for evaluating patient improvement, and even reduce the risk of harm.
The Growing Influence of Care Pathways in Health Care
It’s no secret that health care has been under a lot of pressure for some time. People demand higher-quality care at lower cost, but it’s difficult to meet those demands while following older models of care. Care pathways are a means to provide health professionals with a roadmap that they can follow to achieve patient success.
How so? Because pathways are easy to customize to reach a broad range of patient outcomes. Patients who receive surgery seldom have uniform recovery processes. Their recovery, as well as their need for additional assistance in the form of physical therapy or other therapeutics, naturally depends on the state of their condition before the surgery and the overall effect of the surgery itself. These parameters are easy to include in a care pathway, giving physicians the empirical data they need to design the protocol for that particular patient.
A vector for innovation
Although hospitals and other large healthcare institutions have effectively adopted care pathways, their use is not limited just to the bigger fish in the industry. Healthcare providers at every level have begun implementing pathways in search of common but powerful treatment protocols for their patients. They provide a way to collate data from many resources together into one place, offering actionable intelligence and insights into a patient’s health situation.
In fact, care pathways are a driving force behind the development of emerging healthcare technologies. That’s because they allow for an integrated, standardized way to evaluate the effect of those technologies, providing insights into the effectiveness of their use. This is especially important in the emerging field of artificial intelligence, where the growing volume of data is often analyzed and interpreted by machine learning algorithms. Care pathways provide a common language for all providers to understand the data, making it easier to compare and evaluate the results.
How TRIARQ Uses Care Pathways
Independence healthcare practices are especially vulnerable to cost struggles. Whereas larger institutions may have the resources to absorb the higher costs, smaller practices must find better ways to adapt. For instance, TRIARQ designs value-based care pathways for healthcare providers to enhance their performance capabilities without raising their costs. Our pathways are designed to be easy to implement, requiring only a few physicians’ inputs to develop a plan for their care team.
Data gathered through the pathway is used to create a streamlined post-acute journey for healthcare patients. Once the patient assessment is inputted, the pathway can provide recommended treatment protocols, a roadmap detailing the expected journey toward recovery, and even a network of providers to aid in that recovery. If the protocol calls for physical therapy at a given milestone, the pathway can recommend a pre-approved list of physical therapy providers, each of whom has agreed to collaborate with the primary physician and follow their expertise.
QPathways: Simplifying Care Pathways for Healthcare Providers
QPathways is a proprietary care pathway software provided by TRIARQ that’s especially designed for independent healthcare practices. It allows providers to customize, implement, and monitor their patient care pathway with a few clicks of the mouse. The software uses a smart data engine that drives recommendations, offering automated analysis of clinical data, and enabling physicians to quickly and easily develop a patient’s care plan. The data engine analyzes data from a number of sources, such as electronic medical records, to inform a physician’s decision-making process.
It also provides:
Collaborative care
QPathways makes it easy for providers to communicate with one another from within the platform about patient health outcomes. It offers a unified platform for healthcare providers to discuss patient progress and collaborate with one another to improve their performance.
Automated care plans
QPathways uses a data-driven care pathway approach to treatment protocols. It doesn’t give commands but instead generates guidelines based on the best available medical data and what has worked in the past. This means providers can use the software to generate a care plan that’s personalized to each patient’s needs.
Financial management
TRIARQ’s priority is value-driven care. That’s value for patients and physicians alike. QPathways lets you easily track the utilization of healthcare resources at each stage of care, from pre-op to post-op, to a degree that would have been almost impossible to do efficiently before. The data it provides can help physicians make more cost-effective care decisions for their patients.
The Importance of Collaborative Care Going Forward
The interests of the patient are what dominate care protocols at every level. Providers involved in their care plan need a way to work together and communicate in a way that’s meaningful and easy to understand. Pathways are a way for providers to get the most out of their time, money, and skill, without compromising the level of care offered to patients.