Clinical Process Improvement Defined

Clinical Process Improvement

Clinical process within a healthcare delivery setting comprises multiple methods and data, for the purpose of coordinating clinicians and support staff activities, technology systems, information, and clinical supplies and materials to deliver patient care and to produce clinical outcomes that support an organization’s strategies, goals and financial performance. Clinical process improvement (CPI) is an active, intentional and timely clinical management discipline to continuously discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and control processes while driving cost efficiency and reduction, and eliminating wasteful activities. Clinical processes are, as a rule, omnifarious and composed of complex constellations of data typically containing three information sets:

1. Clinical content that guides, monitors and documents care
2. Clinician behaviors in relation to clinical content and impact on patient care
3. Clinical outcomes vis a vis the medical care provided by clinicians as informed by clinical content and judgment to individual patients and/or patient cohorts.

CPI information technology and software can be utilized by self-service clinical teams for continuous visibility into clinical processes, to enable their discovery, maintenance and control opportunities for sustained improvement, standardization, repeatability and reliability. The era of digital health and value-based care requires adoption of clinical process improvement as a strategic priority for healthcare delivery organizations.