Are you auditing your Practice Performance Periodically?

Every medical practice owner (clinical or non-clinical) should undertake a review of their practice on a regular basis. Through a critical and systematic analysis, it not only becomes easy to improve clinical care delivery or health outcomes but it also helps in confirming if the staff and management are following the guidelines and working properly.

What goes into a medical practice audit?

You can get an audit done for a particular area of your practice that needs to be reviewed and improved. There is a standard against which the current performance of that area needs to be measured. You need experts who will be documenting a written plan and collecting all the data related to the outcomes of the audit. Once this is done, an appropriate action plan needs to be developed that will outline how the action needs to be implemented and monitored.

As and when needed, the experts will be planning subsequent audit cycles so that auditing remains a part of the entire process and quality of services and practice functioning can be improved.

There are many different types of forms that audits can take for a medical practice.  For instance, clinical procedure audit is one of the most common choices of physicians. It helps in comparing processes or outcomes of patient care and health delivery with the existing standards or benchmarks.

Stages of an audit:

When your practice performance is being audited, there are mainly five stages that will be followed. In the first stage, existing guidelines or standards will be reviewed, then comes data collection, comparison of the data with the standards or guidelines, implementation of changes as per the findings and re-audit in which audit is revisited and implemented changes are examined.

Don’t miss conducting an audit:

There are several benefits of getting a practice performance audit done. It will help you in identifying and promoting good practice, it will improve quality standards, you will be able to identify and eliminate waste, it will enable you to promote working with multidisciplinary teams, and you will be able to allocate resources for providing better patient care.

Audits are necessary because they are a quality improvement process. With periodic audits, you can improve patient care delivery and also enhance practice excellence. Medical practitioners should engage in at least one audit exercise annually that relates directly to the performance of their practice.