Quality management - Locally owned guidelines and patient pathways

Background: The construction and implementation of "Practice Guidelines" wa s one of the most important developments in American medicine of the last 1 5 years. There is ongoing controversy about the effectiveness of these guid elines to get introduced into practice. It has been proved, however, that g uidelines developed by care organizations themselves, will show a higher ef fectiveness and acceptance and will achieve more positive results (Internal Guidelines, "Locally Owned" Standards). "wipp": Internal Guidelines are also the starting point Cor the patient pat hways of the model of integrated patient pathways "mipp" developed at the K antonsspital Aarau in the last 7 years. The model is presented with its mai n features: Construction and Implementation of Pathways, Path-Controlling, Path-Benchmarking and Path-Visualization. "mipp" Pathways share with Clinical Pathways the interdisciplinary perspect ives for an efficient quality management. The description of processes is c ombined with an integrated calculation of costs, which is the basis of stan dard cost accounting and even activity based-costing. Conclusion: In the field of upcoming prospective payment systems (PPS) like ARDRG, APDRG etc. it is of utmost importance Or care organizations to have a clear view regarding the treatment processes and the possibilities of th eir improvement.