Quality of Care

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Evaluates Quality of Health Care

Quality of care can only be improved if you can measure it

The InHCc System provides the information needed by the medical audit committee to evaluation the “Quality of Care.” The InHCc System provides this information be measuring actual performance against standards developed by physicians for physicians. Examples are:

Was the appropriate Client and Family medical History taken? Was the social and mental status of the client established?
Comparisons between “syndromes” and “preliminary examination”: Was the examination given reasonable considering the client’s syndromes?
Comparison between “preliminary laboratory requests” and “preliminary examinations”: Where the laboratory test requested reasonable considering the client’s syndromes and his or her preliminary examination?
Comparison between “primary diagnosis” and the results obtained from the “preliminary laboratory requests” and the “preliminary examination”: Was the primary diagnosis reasonable considering the client’s syndromes, physical examination and results from the laboratory?
Comparisons between “primary diagnosis” and “standard treatments” given: Were the correct treatments given to the client or where the treatments too costly (or insufficient) for the diagnosis?
Comparisons between “preliminary diagnosis” and “final diagnosis”: Was the preliminary diagnosis correct?
Comparisons between “expected number of days of care” and “actual” days of care: Was the client under care longer then was normal for the diagnosis?
Client “outcome:” Was the actual client outcome reasonable with what was expected based on the treatment given adjustment for severity of illness on admission?
Number of “revisits” for same illness: Clients may have been discharged too soon; treatment was not appropriate, living conditions unsuitable, etc.

Monitoring of Quality of Care indicators

Quality of Care indicators can be automatically tracked on all patients as they enter the healthcare organization. The real time measures of the patient can be compared with the Quality of Care indicator to ensure that the patient is within normal limits of this care. Alerts can be thrown when any patient is out of these normal ranges.

Adverse Events and Problem Management

All adverse events must have a root cause analysis and must include consideration of any relevant literature.

Minimizes the time taken to use data

It was once asked of the author of this paper, “how long does it take to collect the data?”

Not only is this question inappropriate but it shows a lack of understanding of why data is collected. The correct question would have been “how long does it take from the time of the event when the data is collect to the ability of the managers to be able to use the information.” Data has no value until it is used.

If data only takes a few seconds to collect, but then must by summarized, transferred, and finally after six months or so used; how useful is this information even if it is “easy to collect.”

The InHCc System makes data available to managers in real time.

Maximizes the use of information while minimizing the cost to collect data

It was said in one paper that “users can often develop a short list of indicators that require only modest investments in primary data collection. Costs can also be minimized by developing short lists of indicators that need to be collected only every three to five years. ” This is a waste of money and time!

Any investment should be evaluated by calculating the returns based on the inputs and outputs; it is NOT evaluated by how much it costs to implement or how easy it is. Indicators that are not used to manage and effect changes… return nothing; the return on investment is zero. It makes no difference how easy or cheap data are to collect if the data can not be used to create useful information to manage.

InHCc research shows that people are willing to pay for good health care; it is the same with data collection. If you do not use it, do not collect it. Good data can be, but not necessarily so, a large cost, but in the end the rewards are even greater.

Intellectual property is the most valuable resource that an organization can have.

Quality of Data

Measures to improve the quality of patient-based information have focused on timeliness, relevance, and accuracy. Where “relevance" depends on who is using the information, data available in real time becomes more relevance.

The InHCc System collects information that can be used by managers to manage. In the past, it was considered sufficient to create indicators for “performance evaluation”; the InHCc system creates data to be able to manage these performance indicators, to be able to change them.

Coding rules are built into the InHCc system that help prevent inconsistent data. All codes are entered automatically into the database based on a descriptive selection of the user. The user does not know or need to know the codes. There is no need for “coders”.

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