Providing the best health care requires documenting what is actually being done for each patient, or group of patients, and comparing this documentation to evidence-based clinical guidelines for similar patients.
Systematic review of even a small number of patient records, documenting selected healthcare practices, can yield vital information on the actual quality of care being provided.
Data may be collected on paper forms, by manually reviewing patient records, or by generating electronic reports from practice management software, client registries and/or electronic medical records.
Tips for collection data for healthcare improvement
Plan data collection carefully. There are a number of availabe data collection planning tools.
- Data collection must be easy
- Build data collection into the practice being improved
- Collect only useful data
- Keep the amount of data to a minimum
- Minimize potential for errors
- Use the improvement process to test your data collection process
