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Quality assurance and improvement: the Pediatric Regional Anesthesia Network
Author(s) -
Polaner David M.,
Martin Lynn D.
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
pediatric anesthesia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.704
H-Index - 82
eISSN - 1460-9592
pISSN - 1155-5645
DOI - 10.1111/j.1460-9592.2011.03708.x
Subject(s) - medicine , quality assurance , quality management , benchmark (surveying) , quality (philosophy) , scale (ratio) , medline , cohort , incidence (geometry) , emergency medicine , medical emergency , operations management , management system , philosophy , physics , external quality assessment , geodesy , epistemology , pathology , quantum mechanics , optics , political science , law , economics , geography
Summary Quality assurance and improvement (QA/QI) is a critical activity in medicine. The use of large‐scale collaborative databases is increasingly essential to obtain enough reports with which to establish standards of practice and define the incidence of complications and risk/benefit ratios for rare events. Such projects can enhance local QA/QI endeavors by enabling institutions to obtain benchmark data against which to compare their performance and can be used for prospective analyses of inter‐institutional differences to determine ‘best practice’. The pediatric regional anesthesia network (PRAN) is such a project. The first data cohort is currently being analyzed and offers insight into how such data can be used to detect trends in adverse events and improve care.