Automated key process monitors for patient care documentation

Complete, accurate and timely patient care documentation is an essential part of the practice of medicine. As with any other process in medicine or industry, continuous quality improvement (CQI) is essential to assure the highest quality at the lowest cost. CQI requires objective key process measures that can be assessed routinely. A set of key process monitors designed to assess completeness, accuracy and timeliness were created based on local, regional and national standards. Feasibility was assessed in the LDS Hospital Emergency Department using 31,429 patient visits in the 18 months from June 1995 to November 1996. The logic of the score was programmed into SQL scripts and run against an Oracle database containing the patient care documentation. The results indicate that the chosen key process monitors can be used to provide real time assessment of the patient care documentation process. The general concepts of the key process measures of completeness, accuracy and timeliness are generalizable to many areas of medicine. The overall score provides one method of easily tracking departmental performance while the overall process monitoring database allows powerful, in-depth analysis of individual components of the process. It is recommended that such automated process monitoring tools be integrated into future clinical information systems.