Background

Patients in public healthcare often struggle to understand what will happen to them during their care. From first contact through diagnosis and treatment, the pathway a patient follows is, in most cases, fairly standard — but it is not visible or explained to the patient. This leaves people uncertain about what comes next, why certain steps happen, and how long the process will take, adding unnecessary stress on top of an already difficult situation.

Challenge

How can a patient pathway be automatically created and visualized as soon as a patient enters public healthcare services, and how could it be updated as the diagnosis is confirmed or the care progresses? Wellbeing services counties already publish large amounts of information — guidelines, condition descriptions, treatment options, rehabilitation advice — but this information is scattered, hard to find, and sometimes hard to understand. The project will investigate how such information could be attached to the right point in a patient's pathway, so individuals can easily learn what is happening next and why. ##

Goal

1. Design a method to automatically generate a visual patient pathway from patient records and diagnosis data.

2. Enable the pathway to update dynamically as the diagnosis is refined or the care progresses.

3. Link relevant existing information (guidelines, condition descriptions, treatments, rehabilitation) to the corresponding steps of the pathway, so patients can understand what is happening and why.

4. Build a simple "pathway generator" prototype that produces a patient pathway based on patient records, diagnosis, and how the care is progressing.

Scope

The project is not aimed at a production-ready patient-facing application or full integration with real electronic health records, but at validating whether a patient pathway can be automatically generated, visualized, and kept up to date, and whether existing county information can be meaningfully attached to it. The scope is limited to one or two representative care pathways (e.g. common diagnoses) with simplified, illustrative data, so most effort goes into testing the generation and information-linking approach rather than building a polished end-user product.

Expected Outcomes

- A working prototype of a "pathway generator" that visualizes a patient's care journey based on records, diagnosis, and care progression.

- A method for linking existing wellbeing services county information (guidelines, condition and treatment information, rehabilitation) to the relevant steps of the pathway.

- Findings on how well the pathway can be kept up to date automatically as diagnosis or treatment changes, and where manual input or oversight is still needed.