• E-mail
• Print
• RSS

Ask simple questions to manage your data

Quality Improvement Monitor, August 29, 2008

Quality departments struggling to keep up with increasing demands to collect, analyze, and present data should first take an inventory of what information they’re already collecting and determine whether it ties into the organization’s strategy.

“The real secret is making sure every piece of data you collect, one, you know about, and two, it’s directly tied into your strategy,” says Ken Rohde, author of Making Your Data Work: Tools and Templates for Effective Analysis, published by HCPro, Inc. “Organizations sometimes are collecting a lot more data than they know about, and that data never gets used because people don’t know that they’ve collected it.”

It’s critical that the data is linked to the hospital’s goals, Rohde says. For example, if one of the organization’s strategies is to provide exemplary patient safety, the organization needs to collect information that will reflect its performance in that area.

“If you collect the wrong data, you’re wasting your time, you’re wasting your organization’s time, and you’re frustrating everybody,” says Rohde, a senior consultant at The Greeley Company, a division of HCPro, Inc., in Marblehead, MA. “So you need to make sure you’re collecting the right data.”

p>Access the full story in the August issue of Quality Improvement Report; access is free for subscribers, nonsubscribers can purchase a copy of the story for $10.

For more information, click here.

• E-mail to a Colleague
• Print
• RSS
• Archive