Clinical audit is recommended by multiple colleges and professional standards bodies. Ongoingly, hospitals, health departments and even insurance companies hold data about our clinical outcomes but they often don’t share them with us.
Collecting your own data will give you control about our own clinical performance.
- I like to know how many procedures of a certain type I have done.
- I like to pull their data if I would like to look into a specific aspect of it.
- It puts me in the KNOW if I am within the expected boundaries (e.g., of adverse events) and it enhances my conversations with patients when I obtain consent for surgery.
- Having good knowledge about my data protects me to a certain degree from legal proceedings because I can proof that I am not a reckless surgeon.
- After all, it gives me plenty of CPD hours for my re-accreditation.
However, there are several products available that call themselves audit tools. So which one is the best for you?
The most common types of audits are organised though professional standards bodies, such as Colleges or Professional Societies. Most of these audits are Quality Registries.
In a Quality Registry, you enter data and send them electronically or as a paper copy to a central administering office. The office will store and analyse the data, review them and draw conclusions.
The central office will compare your clinical outcomes with the outcomes of comparable peers. Should you be an outlier, they will contact you and determine a way to resolve the situation.
Examples of Quality Registries are listed by The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare.
By contrast, SurgicalPerformance is an independent Community of Users and not managed by the government or a quasi-government organisation. SurgicalPerformance does not report to a College, hospital or a Professional Society. Surgeons have developed it to address a personal information need and its data fields are carefully selected to represent meaningful and accurate outcomes. Our aim is to provide our surgeon users with feedback about important clinical indicators.
In addition, the plurality of other users forms a reference group. We are able to calculate averages for your patients’ cohort as well as for other users’ patients’ cohort; and we present those data to you in numerical and graphical form.
We do not share identifiable information with any legal entity and should your outcomes be poor, no one will know about it. The only person who will learn about your outcomes is you.
At SurgicalPerformance we believe that surgeons are well trained, motivated and well-intended. Surgeons are super keen to do a great job with their patients. SurgicalPerformance will give our surgeon users the tools to know so that they can constantly reflect to perfect their clinical practice.