Previous
A Personal Practice Audit
Conducting a practice audit is an important part of practice management and can be a step to better care. The usefulness of a personal practice audit, as described by Dr. Marshall Godwin[1], comes from its role in self-assessment and quality improvement in medicine. According to Dr. Godwin, a practice audit is "the practice of asking how well an activity is being conducted in practice, when compared with how well that activity should be conducted". The benchmark of how well am activity should be conducted is called ’the criterion standard’. A personal practice audit is a critical look at what as being done.
It is a personal audit, so that means it is done by you!
Dr. Godwin describes two types:
process
outcome
Process Audit: evaluates an activity that happen during the delivery of care
e.g. A rheumatologist might look at her scleroderma patients to see how many have had yearly screening for pulmonary hypertension, which is the standard.
Outcome Audit: evaluates the results of activities during the delivery of care
e.g. A rheumatologist might look at rheumatoid arthritis patients on biologic therapy to see how many have had adverse events related to therapy.
14 steps to completing an audit:
Choose a topic
Choose a criterion standard
Write out your main audit question and secondary questions
Decide which data you want to collect from the charts
Design your data collection form
Decide how many charts you will audit
Decide how you will choose the charts
Pull the charts and collect the data using the abstraction sheet
Enter the data into the computer
Answer your audit questions
Present results and share them with colleagues
Decide what changes you should make based on the results
Implement the changes
Re-audit after time has elapsed.[1]
_________________________________
1. Godwin M. Conducting a clinical practice audit. Fourteen steps to better patient care. Can Fam Physician2001;47(11): 2331-3. Available at: www.cfp.ca/content/47/11/2331.full.pdf+html accessed: October 1, 2011.