The Australian Centre for Evidence-based Clinical Practice generic audit tool: Auditmaker for health professionals

Audit is an important step in the process of health care evaluation and quality improvement. Some of the barriers to audit include the lack of support in initiating an audit, difficulty with data collection and lack of time. Auditmaker is a computer package that guides the clinician through the initial process of designing an audit, choosing factors and outcomes to analyse, then provides customizable data entry forms, and finally simple reports summarizing the data. It has user-friendly features, such as help buttons, drop-down lists and built in comorbidities and outcomes of common interest. It provides a generic tool for performing an audit as well as providing an opportunity for different clinicians in different institutions or practice settings to perform similar audits using the same data collection tool, which can provide the basis of benchmarking. Auditmaker is available for downloading from the ACEPBCP website: http://www.acebcp.org.au.