Everyone is doing something. The pathway still does not move.
A GP has referred. A provider is waiting for information. A municipality is waiting for treatment to begin. Each organisation has completed its task, yet nobody appears to own the next step.
Our working definition
A process gap is cross-organisational stagnation where ownership of the complete pathway is missing, unclear or ineffective.
The wording matters. It is not about one organisation failing, and not about individual professionals doing their work badly. It describes what happens in the space between organisations, where no single party is responsible for the whole and the person in the middle ends up coordinating it themselves.
Why we start with measurement
The obvious response to a stalled pathway is to appoint a coordinator. We deliberately do not start there. First we want to know whether stagnation can be reconstructed at all: reliably, transparently and in a way another researcher could repeat.
If that turns out to be impossible, that is a finding in itself. A problem that cannot be measured cannot be managed either.
We have not measured a single case with this method yet. Everything on this page is a proposal, not a result. We publish the method before we publish conclusions, so the method can be criticised first.
Three causes we distinguish
- Capacity: there is no place, no professional, or a waiting list.
- Clinical: a professional has a substantive reason to wait.
- Ownership: nobody is monitoring the whole, or whoever wants to is not permitted to decide.
That third category is what this foundation is about. The first two are widely researched; the third is mostly described in essays rather than measured.
What we would need
Reconstructing a pathway across organisational boundaries means combining records held by different parties, each with their own legal basis for processing personal data. Whether that is possible at all, and under which conditions, is part of what the method proposal examines.
Have you experienced a pathway that stalled?
We collect examples to make the pattern visible. The Dutch form asks about the course of events, not about medical details.