HCFA offers free data collection tool
The Health Care Financing Administration is offering free data collection software to interested health care organizations.
"MedQuest is a tool which allows you to capture any kind of data you want," Bob Mayes, project officer for MedQuest, tells Home Infusion Therapy Management. The software allows users to design sophisticated data collection systems without the need for programming.
MedQuest documentation and tutorial programs also are available, all of which have come directly from HCFA’s extensive experience in collecting clinical information.
"In the past, we would work on various modules or projects on areas such as pneumonia, urinary tract infection, or other different areas of clinical care we were interested in," says Mayes. "We would develop a data collection tool in collaboration with experts in the field where we would decide what quality indicators we were looking for and what data we needed to collect to look at those quality indicators. Then we would create a tool that would extract these data."
Each program was developed one by one until HCFA decided to develop one program that could be used for any data collection.
"So a year ago, we started generalizing the tool so any user could develop sophisticated clinical data collection systems and build those without any programming necessary," says Mayes.
The software is available on HCFA’s Web site at http://www.hcfa.gov/medicare/hsqb/medquest/medq1.htm.
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