Abstract
Although clinical pathways have been popular for many years, predominant approaches to the analysis of pathways have been based on frequently used statistical methods (i.e. comparison of two groups with parametric and non-parametric tests). More discussions on using advanced statistical methods to analyse clinical pathway data and the statistical framework of clinical pathways are necessary. Survival analysis is one advanced statistical method, which is a collection of statistical procedures for data analysis for which the outcome variable of interest is time until an event occurs. Survival analysis can be used in many applied fields, such as medicine, biology, public health and epidemiology. Clinical pathways also produce data suitable for application to survival analysis when the primary variable of the research is time until the predefined event occurs. In this study, survival analysis and how it can be used to analyze clinical pathways are explained in the application of real pathway data.
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