Standardising Clinical Caremaps: Model, Method and Graphical Notation for Caremap Specification

Abstract

Standardising care can improve patient safety and outcomes, and reduce the cost of providing healthcare services. Caremaps were developed to standardise care, but contemporary caremaps are not standardised. Confusion persists in terms of terminology, structure, content and development process.. Unlike existing methods in the literature, the approach, model and notation presented in this chapter pays special attention to incorporation of clinical decision points as first-class citizens within the modelling process. The resulting caremap with decision points is evaluated through creation of a caremap for women with gestational diabetes mellitus. The proposed method was found to be an effective way for comprehensively specifying all features of caremaps in a standardised way that can be easily understood by clinicians. This chapter contributes a new standardised method, model and notation for caremap content, structure and development.

Approach and Method for Bayesian Network Modelling: A Case Study in Pregnancy Outcomes for England and Wales

“…The expert elicitation process used in our work created information visualisations called caremaps that describe the progression of disease, diagnosis and treatment processes and possible patient outcomes in the form of a flow diagram or process map. The process for developing caremaps containing clinical decision points and decision criteria has previously been described in [32]. Our clinical experts for this work included a registered midwife with more than 15 years experience (BJD) and an associate professor and specialist in obstetrics and gynaecology (SS).…”