Primary Care Pathways/PATH Initiatives

About Primary Care Pathways (Pathways):

UW Medicine is developing ambulatory clinical care pathways which will allow for a system-wide, evidence-based approach to delivering predictably excellent care to patients in primary care.

Goals:

• Reduce unnecessary variation in patient care by building consensus around evidence based protocols and reducing unnecessary procedures, interventions, tests, or labs.
• Optimize the health and experience of patients with certain conditions and diseases.  Ambulatory pathways are a standard tool to help providers, nurses and other clinical team members to implement comprehensive, individualized care plans for their patients using the most up-to-date information and connections to resources in the community.
• Improve care coordination for chronic disease management.
• Support the use of evidence based guidelines in key areas of opportunity in clinical practice such as, depression, hypertension, diabetes and low back pain.

Find out more here.

About Population Approach to Health (PATH):

PATH is an outlier management program designed to track and monitor sub-populations of patients who have “fallen off the Pathway”. The program acts as a “safety net” for the Pathways for certain patient populations.

Goal: To build an infrastructure for a successful population approach to health in order to improve quality and care gap performance across a variety of sub-populations in value-based contracts.

Find out more here.

How Pathways and PATH Align