Patients with cirrhosis require highly specialized, evidence-based management to prevent or treat life-threatening complications. Traditionally, clinical decision-support tools—such as best practice alerts—have seen inconsistent uptake when they fail to align with the realities of a busy clinical environment. Building on findings from the Cirrhosis: Evaluation of New Order Sets and Web Resources project, this initiative focused on developing an intuitive, integrated Cirrhosis Carepath within the provincial Connect Care system. Led by PLP Medical Director Dr. Puneeta Tandon, and leveraging success from existing carepath models for COPD and heart failure, PLP Edmonton’s Senior Human Centred Designer guided the human centred design approach to translate frontline clinician input into practical, workflow-aligned digital tools. The multidisciplinary team also included specialist physicians, clinical informaticists, Connect Care software developers. By prioritizing early and ongoing clinician input, the team ensured the digital tools were not only clinically rigorous but also practical for daily use.

Initially, PLP developed modular infographic elements, now used in two cirrhosis Our Practice Advisories (OPA, previously called best practice alerts), which flag important information and direct care providers to the cirrhosis summary dashboard. Since their launch in fall 2025, there have been nearly 7,000 interactions with the cirrhosis OPAs. Based on the success of that work, the project expanded to include the Connect Care Cirrhosis Summary dashboard and progressed through two strategic phases: a Collaborative Design Phase to gather frontline feedback and a Qualitative Evaluation Phase to refine the tools based on real-world effectiveness. While the underlying clinical data (e.g., laboratory results, medications, imaging) already existed within the EMR, this project introduced a fundamentally new workflow layer that aggregates fragmented information into a centralized clinical summary dashboard organized around clinically meaningful domains. Designed to support decision-making rather than simple data viewing, this functionally new interface represents a net-new clinical product experience within Connect Care. In parallel, integrated documentation templates were enhanced to auto-populate key laboratory values, model for end-stage liver disease (MELD) scores, medications, and complications, which reduced documentation burden while improving consistency and quality of data capture.

Following a successful soft launch with on-site observations and iterative workflow refinements, including longitudinal medication tracking and automated risk calculations, the Cirrhosis Carepath officially launched province-wide on January 15, 2026, making it available to all clinicians caring for inpatients with cirrhosis across Alberta. To support the new cirrhosis OPA and summary dashboard implementation, PLP developed a “New Inpatient Cirrhosis Care Support Tools tip sheet”, a provider education tool, to summarize the features and help support workflow integration. This comprehensive suite of tools enhances clinical efficiency and reduces information fragmentation within Connect Care by consolidating relevant clinical information and laboratory results, providing standardized order panels to streamline admission and discharge workflows, and offering a centralized clinical summary dashboard for real-time decision support.

With the Cirrhosis Summary dashboard and carepath now live, the project has transitioned into its analytics and scale phase. Current work includes development of an outpatient version and activation of the Chronic Liver Disease Registry, creating the high-quality data infrastructure needed for provincial quality evaluation and long-term improvements in patient outcomes.

By introducing a functionally new clinical workflow layer within Connect Care, the Cirrhosis Carepath centralizes fragmented data, reduces documentation burden, and embeds evidence-based decision support directly into clinician workflows. This enables safer, more timely clinical decisions while creating a scalable foundation for province-wide quality improvement in cirrhosis care.