Lung Cancer Clinical Audit
Lung Cancer Clinical Audit, Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre
The Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre (VCCC) and Western and Central Melbourne Integrated Cancer Service (WCMICS) engaged HMA to undertake a clinical audit of lung cancer patients across the six partner health services. The scope of the audit included all patients with a newly diagnosed lung cancer in 2013 across diagnosis, care planning, procedures, treatments (including surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy), palliative care and outcomes. The aim of the project was to provide reliable information to clinicians and health management on patient care and outcomes. Key tasks included:
- development of a secure database with an online interface for data capture
- development, in collaboration with VCCC / WCMICS, of a data dictionary for the audit
- liaison with relevant hospital staff to obtain routinely collected lung cancer information from each health service
- data cleansing to align pre-existing data with the data dictionary
- liaison and scheduling with hospitals and health information managers to conduct a medical records audit of relevant patients (as identified by VCCC / WCMICS)
- collection of patient data from the hospital medical record (by contracted health information managers)
- data analysis and benchmarking of appropriate data to international lung cancer statistics, and
- assessment of the availability of relevant lung cancer data from VCCC / WCMICS partner health services and identification of existing data collection gaps.
This project was completed in March 2016.
The client has subsequently published a report on the findings of the audit. Click on the link for the published report: 10.1111/imj.14183
