The present conditions, problems and future direction of the server-controlled clinical pathway system development in psychiatric hospitals

Clinical pathways used today are paper-based, although many different kinds of clinical pathway are used in clinical practice. However, in the development of software for clinical pathway, it is difficult to achieve cooperation between medical experts, who are not used to expressing their ideas and work in words, and system-developers whose medical knowledge is limited. As a consequence, the current situation is that medical practitioners make their own software and use it in their practice. While this may work, it is less than ideal because refinements that may make the software most effective through engineering expertise is not used. Thus, in our research team, the nurse researchers and the engineering researchers cooperated and developed a clinical pathway system. In this paper, the present conditions, problems, and future direction of the server-controlled CP system development in the psychiatric hospitals, is discussed from viewpoint of nursing as a user.