Data collection priorities

When we are short of collection staff (e.g. vacations, H1N1, etc) consider the following guidelines to prioritize your work:

• Ideally at the beginning of the day, but at least once per shift, check your email and the recent changes on the wiki. The world doesn't stop changing because staff is away, so make sure you know so you don't have to go back and fix your data.
• The very first data collection priority (regardless of personnel limitations) will be to collect the "Minimal Data Set" on all patients.
• Once the minimal data set is collected on all admitted patients for a given day, if there is time leftover the data collector will identify patients who either have left the unit, or are very close to discharge, and gather the entire data set on as many of those patients as time permits. Finishing some patients rather than keeping up with all will allow for more patient’s data to be sent and will leave fewer patients on the PDA to be followed up on later.

Context

In response to the reduction in data collection personnel availability in the wake of the H1N1 pandemic, the was charged with the task of delineating a reduced data collection schema. We went into it assuming that we’d identify a subset of the entire dataset that would be collected on all patients during the personnel shortage, with the idea that the rest of the data items would be filled in after the shortage was ended. However, we realized that the workflow of data collectors demands a different approach to personnel limitations. This is because it is much quicker to gather the data once a patient has left the unit (or is very close to leaving), and data collection of any subset of data results in a need to duplicate effort subsequently to gather the remaining data elements. In times of personnel shortage, this means that we’ll fall increasingly further behind in completing data collection, but by maintaining the minimal data set on all admitted patients we will know which charts need to be pulled to catch up after the personnel shortage ends.

(as per Dr. Allan Garland)Ttenbergen 09:23, 3 July 2009 (CDT)