IMPLEMENTATION OF AN IMPROVEMENT CYCLE IN HOSPITAL RECORDS: A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Abstract

Objective: To implement and evaluate a program to improve medical records in a hospital located in the municipality of Farias Brito, Ceará State, Brazil. Material and Method: Quasi-experimental study of the type before and after the evaluation of quality criteria, with a quantitative approach. The survey was conducted between January 2017 and July 2018. 87 records were evaluated in randomly selected medical records that had been performed by the multi-professional team consisting of 35 professionals. The research was carried out in six steps: 1) Identification and prioritization of a quality problem, 2) Analysis of the causes of the problem, 3) Development of criteria to evaluate the quality level, 4) Evaluation of the quality level, 5) Improvement intervention aimed at the most problematic criteria, and 6) Re-evaluation of the quality level. To assess quality
before and after the intervention, point estimation and confidence interval (CI= 95%) of the level of compliance to eight criteria was calculated. To evaluate the effect of the intervention, absolute and relative improvement of each one-sided hypothesis test was estimated by calculating the Z-score. In the improvement cycle, data were analyzed using Pareto chart. Results: In the first measurement, compliance rates of 36.30% on average were obtained, while in the second measurement there was an increase in the average level of compliance of all criteria by 19.45%. Conclusion: It is clear that the improvement cycle is an effective tool to strengthen the quality of the hospital services, especially when related to quality of patient’s medical records.