The International Editorial Pathway of the IJCP

Abstract

In 2009 when Kris Vanhaecht and I took over the editorship of the International Journal of Care Pathways – IJCP, the journal was struggling to consistently attract papers of sufficiently high quality. One of the first tasks that Kris and I tried to achieve was to broaden the journal’s scope and to try to turn the IJCP into a widely read, truly international journal that attracted papers and readers from all over the world. Our aim was (and still is) to produce a leading international peer-reviewed journal which focuses on the issues of the growing area of implementation research related to care pathways – CP (also known as clinical pathways, critical pathways or integrated care pathways) and the organization of care processes. The IJCP is now the official journal of the European Pathway Association (www.E-P-A.org), an international not for profit scientific association with members in more than 50 countries worldwide, to support research and knowledge sharing on the organization of care processes. A specific journal on care pathways is necessary to support health care clinicians and managers in their daily search for excellence by publishing project reports and to support academic discussions on the pathway concept and methods to evaluate pathways within the field of implementation research. As the organization of care processes has a direct impact on the quality of care and patient safety, discussions on its organization, evaluation and follow-up need to be held in specific peer reviewed international journals. According to this, the IJCP focuses on how pathways and other structured care methodologies affect quality, safety, teamwork and efficiency, and the role of patients, carers, health and social care professionals, managers, policy-makers and stakeholders, including the purchasers and commissioners of services, and those who monitor them for efficiency and effectiveness. This includes issues relating to the organization of the care process itself and to the methodologies and outcomes related to planning, development, implementation, education & training, communication and evaluation. Debate and commentary are also included, to encourage readers to think critically and constructively about the many broad issues surrounding the application, management and evaluation of care processes. The IJCP concentrates on highlighting different areas of research but also on the general applicability and practical significance and importance to clinicians and health care managers. The growing interest in care pathways and the organization of care processes started with the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) Crossing the Quality Chasm report in 2001. The IOM suggested organizing care around patient needs and medical conditions and not around professional groups or operational units. Now 10 years later, there are not only local care process improvement projects worldwide but also large cluster randomized controlled trials on the effect of pathways on patient outcomes available. Care pathways and the organization of care processes is therefore a difficult area of research and publications. It is situated in-between management and clinical research, and accordingly we try to include papers able to combine clinical, management and health services research. In this issue are different kinds of papers. In the paper ‘Facilitating the development of evidencebased order sets and care pathways: lessons learned from an academic medical centre’s implementation of a new electronic health record’, Liu et al., outlines one academic institution’s experience in adopting a new electronic health record system that includes computerized provider order entry and goes on to describe the efforts to stimulate the development of order set content throughout all clinical sections and departments. Based on this experience, specific recommendations and guidance to facilitate the development of evidence-based order set and care pathway content are described. Julie Hall and Patrick Callaghan present in their article the results obtained through a focus group study of service user and carer experience of a care pathway in mental health and their findings reveal a number of contrasts, including the perspective that people did not feel that their care was individualized to them. In their paper on the results of the Welsh Collaborative Care Pathway Project, Johnstone, Jones and Fowell show how it was possible to implement, sustain and maintain the use of care pathways for the past days of life over a large and varied geographical area. IJCP includes researchpapers and case studiesonprojects and programmes from all over the world, and for these reasons we decided to strengthen our Editorial team by taking on board three new Associate Editors from different continents. We are proud to introduce the new Associate Editors that will support the IJCP from the next issue: Dr Rashad Massoud, Dr Hugo Arce, Dr Hidehisa Sohejima, and Dr Ali Djibo. Dr Rashad Massoud is our new Associate Editor from North America. Dr Massoud, a physician internist and an internationally recognized leader in improving health care, is Senior Vice President for the Quality and Performance Institute at University Research Co. LLC. (URC), in Bethesda, MD, USA, and Director of the USAID Health Care Improvement Project (HCI) – a centrally procured global contract, currently active in 32 countries. Dr Massoud served as Senior Vice President at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) in Cambridge, MA, overseeing IHI’s Strategic Partnerships – the key customers working with IHI on innovation, transformation and large scale spread. In his previous capacities, he worked at URC where he led several improvement efforts around the globe, including pioneering the adaptation of collaborative improvement methodology to developing country settings, working on developing the World Health Organization’s (WHO) strategy for design & scale-up of antiretroviral therapy to meet the 3 5 target and large scale improvement in the Russian Federation. He also founded and for