Quality assurance in cardiac surgery--history, preliminaries, practical experience

Every hospital doctor will be aware of the importance of correct documentation. We are concerned with quality assurance because this provides an aid towards optimising treatment results and also enables multi-centre comparisons to be made. The set of data used for three years during the pilot study provides the basis for the formation of mutually comparable risk groups. As the next step in the process of assessment, factors in the care process which are or may be of relevance for quality could be evaluated. The abbreviated version drafted on the basis of multi-variant analyses now enables every cardiac clinic to manage its documentation in such a way that its data are available for the central evaluation point for further multi-variant analyses. At the same time, every hospital can conduct any counts currently required on the basis of its own data with no trouble, and also produce the data required for the Annual Statistics which were first produced 12 years ago.