A unique control charting software tool designed specifically for health care. Provides guidance for those who are new to Statistical Process Control, and flexibility for the advanced practitioner.

About QTrendz

As an integral part of AICE, QTrendz plots and prints 7 control charts and 5 run charts to easily meet TJC requirements.

The Need for Indicators

It's difficult to understand month-to-month variation in healthcare outcomes. It is even harder to explain this variation to your safety, infection prevention, quality improvement, and risk management committees. A certain degree of variation can be expected--it's an unavoidable characteristic of biological processes that, unlike machines, do not always react exactly the same way to a given stimulus. Treatment responses will differ even among patients with the same infection who are treated with the same drugs and cared for by the same healthcare provider.

Despite this inherent variability, we still need a way to measure the quality of administered care. We do this by selecting indicators - objectively measurable facts about a patient¹s care (processes) or response to care (outcomes). We then collect ongoing surveillance data, usually rates or continuous measurements, pertaining to these indicators.

The Importance of Control Charts

Regardless of which indicator you choose, your measurements will have a certain amount of background variability for the reasons discussed above.

And because of this normal variation, it is difficult to identify truly abnormal measurements - so difficult, in fact, that an entire science called Statistical Process Control has been developed to solve this problem.

Using control charts as its primary tool, Statistical Process Control can flag indicators that have gone "out of control" and then help you identify the preventable risk factors or human behaviors associated with the abnormal event. Only when you are armed with this information can you focus your educational and preventive efforts at problems that are:

• Real (not random)
• Preventable
• Cause clinically significant problems for patients

QTrendz Intro |QTrendz Control Charts 101 (PDF) |
Overview (PDF)