Exploratory Study for Myocardial Infarction Clinical Pathway Compliance and Performance

Objectives: Although Clinical Pathway (CP) standardizes the patient care, poor compliance remains. The consistency of the expert’s opinion on the CPs significance to the pattern of Clinical Pathway completeness was explored. Methods/Statistical Analysis: Mixed method and data triangulation were used in this study. Two types of data were collected from one hospital for STEMI (St Elevation Myocardial Infarction) patients. Primary (Survey) and secondary (CP filled documents) data were collected. Clinical Pathway content analyses with descriptive statistics were conducted using SPSS version 22. The influence of design on the completeness of the document was investigated. Findings: The content analysis revealed four main care processes in STEMI Clinical Pathway (Medical assessment and nursing, Medication therapy and treatment, Education nutrition and rehabilitation and outcome variance). We found differences in the design of the documents. Most of the experts (58%) agreed on the importance of time to treatment, while 35% of the respondents have a strong agreement on the importance of fast action to treatment and nothing should delay the intervention. CP1 was holding the highest ratio of documents completeness despite the fact that CP2 and CP3 are the improved version of CP1. Application/Improvements: The variance of the expert opinion from the real Clinical Pathway performance indicated inconsistency between the knowledge and practice. Further explanation for the phenomenon is recommended.