Implementation of Clinical Pathway to Diagnose Diffuse Parenchymal Lung Disease

Patients with diffuse parenchymal lung diseases (DPLDs), inexorably progress to respiratory failure, permanent physical disability, poor quality of life, and becoming a significant societal burden. A clinical pathway (CP) is a coordinated care plan according to evidence-based practice and guidelines that involve multidiscipline management for a specific group of patients during a period. With cooperation and collaboration between various disciplines (respiratory, rheumatology, radiology and public health), we developed a CP to diagnose DPLDs. The aim of developing this CP is to standardise the care of the disease, reduce diagnosis delay, encourage early initiation of therapy and provide quality care to patients. The developed CP focuses on outpatient settings and involves four clinic visits. Our study demonstrates that utilising CP significantly reduces the time required to diagnose DPLDs, with a median diagnosis time of 29 days, as compared to 122 days without using CP. The CP implementation has improved multidisciplinary teamwork and care planning, medical safety and increased patient quality of care in the management of DPLDs.