Acquisition and use of clinical data for audit and research

Abstract

Acquisition of adequate patient data for clinical management is hard enough, but higher quality patient data are needed for clinical audit and research. This article discusses some of the problems of using routine clinical data for audit and research, aspects of data quality, sources of audit or research data and their problems, methods for improving data quality, the benefits and problems of computer‐based systems and current trends in the capture and processing of clinical data. Copyright © 1995, Wiley Blackwell. All rights reserved