A Patient Care Quality Assurance System. Executive Summary

摘要

The objective was to implement extensions to an existing hospital-wide medical information system (which had been previously shown to be cost effective) to derive quality of care benefits at marginal cost. The first two of the following four sub-systems were successfully completed and are operational: a computer-assisted, diagnosis-particular, outcomes-oriented Nurse Care Planning Subsystem; a computer-based Patient-Care Audit Subsystem (concurrent and retrospective, using a new audit methodology called Generic Audit); Patient-Care-Plan-Based Staffing Requirements Subsystem; and a Services Coordination Subsystem. The latter two subsystems were partially completed; in particular 'reasonable' results were obtained from manual tests of the Staffing Requirements Subsystem. A new hospital audit methodology was developed using non-specific outcome indicators applicable to all/any patients for medical audit. Early results suggest that this computer-supported audit on all hospital patients is more comprehensive, more reliable (based on more cases), less costly and more timely than the conventional diagnosis/procedure specific approach and is acceptable to staff.