Digital Patient Pathway Tracking Framework for Teaching Hospitals

This work presents a Digital Patient Pathway Tracking Framework designed to strengthen continuity of care and improve longitudinal patient monitoring within teaching hospital settings. In many low- and middle-income healthcare systems, patient care pathways remain fragmented across departments and disease programs, resulting in incomplete clinical histories, poor follow-up tracking, and loss of patients across the continuum of care. The framework provides a structured, interoperable approach for tracking patients across multiple points of care within hospital systems, including outpatient visits, laboratory services, inpatient admissions, and referral pathways. It is designed to integrate fragmented health data sources into a unified patient journey model that enables real-time and retrospective analysis of care continuity. The system supports longitudinal patient tracking across key service areas such as maternal health, infectious diseases, chronic disease management, and specialist clinics. It incorporates a modular data architecture that allows integration with existing electronic medical records, paper-based registers, and laboratory information systems commonly used in teaching hospitals. Key functionalities include patient identification and linkage, care pathway visualization, follow-up tracking, missed appointment detection, and service utilization mapping. The framework is designed to support both routine clinical operations and health systems research by enabling analysis of patient flow, service gaps, and retention across care pathways. From a health systems perspective, the framework strengthens continuity of care, improves coordination between departments, and provides actionable insights for clinical decision-making and hospital management. It also serves as an enabling infrastructure for implementation science research and digital health optimization in resource-constrained hospital environments. Overall, this work contributes to the development of scalable digital health infrastructure aimed at improving patient retention, reducing fragmentation of care, and supporting data-driven health system strengthening in teaching hospitals.