Table 1 Review definition following the PPCT framework [15]

Population

Real patients who have undergone clinical care whose electronic data captures some aspect of care related activities

Phenomena of interest

The abstraction of sequential care activities from that data to derive a set of de facto care pathways; any use of additional techniques or data facilitating further evaluation of the derived de facto pathways; and any assessments of the practical utility of the research in the context from which the data derived

Context

The sequential care activities described above are undertaken on patients with evolving clinical context, carried out by particular clinical roles, and may take place in a sequence of specific locations. The de facto care pathways experienced by patients may be defined from the frame of reference of any of these aspects of clinical care

Types of studies

All reports where some discussion of the relevance of the derived care pathways takes place, therefore excluding the use of synthetic data or purely methodological reports, but including different analyses on the same study