Module 4 question 2

How does nursing data quality relate to decision support?

Until this course I never truly understood the value of having "quantifiable data". Being an older nurse, who documented on paper for years, the argument that so much of nurse's documentation is not quantifiable was not a viable reason to force me to chart using a check list method. The colorful descriptions painted a picture for the reader.

In contrast, the data that nurses can collect and document using electronic charting programs, can generate information for the institution related to specific diagnosis, treatments, and outcomes. In our institution, we have a Quality team which utilizes the data to answer quality questions such as how many patients have been offered smoking cessation information, or how many incidents of medication errors have occurred? Items can be further defined to determine time of day, specific causes, etc. The institution can also use the data to compare themselves with similar hospitals to benchmark themselves. For example, when there was an increase in CDifficile in our institution, we compared ourselves with others in the UHC database. We discovered we were exceedingly high; we could not simply blame the increase on the chemotherapy or antibiotics. We had to investigate the possible causes, and formulate a plan of action.