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. 2025 May 15:12:e68581.
doi: 10.2196/68581.

Personalized Digital Care Pathways Enable Enhanced Patient Management as Perceived by Health Care Professionals: Mixed-Methods Study

David Rodrigues  1   2   3 , Clara Jasmins  2   3 , Ricardo Ladeiras-Lopes  3   4 , Luis Patrao  3   5 , Eduardo Freire Rodrigues  3
Affiliations

Personalized Digital Care Pathways Enable Enhanced Patient Management as Perceived by Health Care Professionals: Mixed-Methods Study

David Rodrigues et al. JMIR Hum Factors. .

Abstract

Background: Clinical decision support systems are known to improve adherence to clinical practice guidelines and patient outcomes by providing clinicians with timely, accurate, and appropriate knowledge.

Objective: This study investigates the perceived usefulness and practical implementation of UpHill Route v3, a personalized digital care pathway (PDCP) system, in enhancing clinical decision-making and patient management across various clinical settings.

Methods: A mixed-methods retrospective study was conducted among medical doctors and nurses from four National Health System-Local Health Units in Portugal. Data were collected from May 2023 to April 2024. The primary data source was an anonymous questionnaire assessing health care professionals' perceptions of UpHill Route v3's usefulness using the Likert scale ranging from 0 (do not agree) to 10 (totally agree). Secondary analysis involved quantifying decisions across heart failure, multimorbidity, diabetes, and colorectal and breast cancer clinical pathways. These data were collected from user interactions with UpHill Route v3 as well as from its internal database. Descriptive and bivariate statistics were used to analyze the data.

Results: A total of 22 health care professionals with mean age 44.7 (SD 10.6) years, including 15 (68%) female participants and 9 (41%) physicians were included in the study. High ratings for adherence to clinical protocols, mean score 8.06 (SD 1.73); clinical decision support, mean score 8.05 (SD 1.73); patient care improvement, mean score 7.63 (SD 2.22); and confidence in patient management, mean score 8.26 (SD 1.56) were reported. Secondary analysis showed that across 3574 patients, 25,741 clinical decisions were informed, and 9254 actions were performed with the assistance of the PDCP tool.

Conclusions: The UpHill Route v3 PDCP tool is highly valued by health care professionals for its ability to support clinical decision-making and improve operational efficiency across various clinical settings. Our findings suggest that this tool can effectively bridge the gap between clinical guidelines and real-world practice.

Keywords: care integration; clinical pathway; digital; heart failure.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest: All authors of this study are employees of UpHill, S.A. This affiliation may represent a potential conflict of interest. Efforts were made to ensure the study’s design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation were conducted impartially and without undue influence from the author’s employment status. The findings and conclusions presented in this manuscript are based on objective data and aim to contribute to the scientific understanding of clinical decision support systems.

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