February 4, 2019
 
The QUEST Diabetes Balanced Scorecard aims to monitor quality in diabetes care by tracking university-wide patient data across a number of key indicators. These indicators, which encompass laboratory results, physical exams, counselling and medications, not only represent a helpful snapshot of the status of care for individual patients, but when compiled and analyzed together – through the lens of both individual patients and diabetes clinics – allow us to develop quality benchmarks and to better identify existing gaps in diabetes ambulatory care.

From paper patient files to Electronic health records (EHRs), different methods of recording clinical information offer varying degrees of challenge in extracting and analyzing key data. When clinics use paper charts, identifying and isolating specific information related to the scorecard’s indicators can require sifting through pages and pages – a sometimes insurmountable challenge that can reduce the amount of utilizable information and erode the scorecard’s accuracy and usefulness.

But this diabetes and metabolic flow sheet is an easy-to-use, one-page tool that streamlines the compilation of this crucial data, putting everything in a single place.

Cumulative patient profiles such as this one have been recognized as a best practice everywhere from family medicine to diabetes care, because they clearly separate out the most pertinent information. Such profiles eliminate the need for repetitive history taking and make it easier for clinicians to quickly zero in on relevant patient data. But while there are various existing models of cumulative profiles, none of the available options captured the data most relevant to our assessment of the quality of diabetes ambulatory care.

Created in consultation with doctors and a designer, the new QUEST Diabetes Balanced Scorecard-specific flow sheet  is in a ready-to-use format that offers a unified snapshot of important diabetes care indicators that is helpful to both clinicians and patients at a glance. Click here to download and print it now.