Evaluating quality of primary care using the electronic medical record

Healthcare organizations are under increasing pressure to evaluate and report the level of quality in their health services. The electronic medical record (EMR) has been used in acute care settings to provide clinical data for quality evaluations. The implementation of the EMR in primary care settings is a more recent development, and as a result, the EMR has not been widely used to evaluate quality in primary care. Little research exists that uses the primary care medical record as a source of data. What remains to be seen is the extent to which EMRs contain the variables needed to address quality of primary care. This article describes a study that investigated the viability of the EMR as a database for evaluating quality in a women's primary health clinic.