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"Software for collecting and reporting details of patients, admissions, diagnoses, treatments and outcomes in order to review the performance of a surgical unit."
Welcome to Otago Clinical Audit
Surgical audit has become an important part of the modern practice of surgery and an integral requirement for the surgeon's continuing professional development.
A good clinical audit process allows surgeons and hospitals to accurately report their outcomes with the potential to lower the costs of providing improved patient care. The Otago Clinical Audit solution provides the tools, technologies and support to make effective and efficient audit a reality. This provides a key framework for ongoing quality assurance.
The advantage of OCA software is that it is designed by clinicians, providing ease of use for clinicians.
About Us...
The Department of Surgery at the University of Otago, New Zealand, in conjunction with surgeons at Dunedin Hospital, has conducted a systematic computerised Surgical Audit since October 1984. In 1987 the process of audit was reviewed and software for other surgeons embarking on clinical audit was designed1 to collect, verify and report audit data, resulting in the relatively unobtrusive incorporation of audit practices into the routines of busy surgical units.
The Otago Audit system was adapted for a range of surgical specialities and sold throughout Australasia. Continuing modifications were made and the ability to analyse very large databases was introduced. In New Zealand a very successful national system for audit for vascular surgery was developed. In 2002 Windows software became available, and now in 2005, this is updated to utilise the latest technology available.
Data on 55,000+ patients is available in our audit database to assist peer-review, to answer enquiries from our clinical management, to determine surgical workloads, to monitor training of registrars and to evaluate overall performance.
The Otago Clinical Audit Unit continues as a not for profit initiative to help surgeons achieve clinical audit in whatever size or type of practice.
1 Pettigrew RA, McDonald JR, van Rij AM. Developing a system for Surgical Audit. Aust. N.Z. J Surg 1991;61:563-569
