An inexpensive hospital-based program for outcome evaluation

A relatively low-cost outcome evaluation program was developed for a 147-bed psychiatric hospital with a variety of inpatient programs and extensive outpatient and partial hospital facilities. The evaluation staff consists of the research director, a senior research assistant, and a secretary. Much of the program's data comes from documents completed by clinical staff, which are then scanned by an optical mark-reading scanner. The data are automatically entered into a data base and analyzed using PC-based software, SPSS for Windows. Data are used to produce in-house reports that are distributed to clinical programs and the hospital's quality assurance committee. This in-house system can be tailored to an individual hospital's needs and is a less expensive alternative to evaluation by an external contractor.