tailieunhanh - Báo cáo y học: "The essential nature of healthcare databases in critical care medicine"

Tuyển tập các báo cáo nghiên cứu về y học được đăng trên tạp chí y học Critical Care giúp cho các bạn có thêm kiến thức về ngành y học đề tài: The essential nature of healthcare databases in critical care medicine. | Available online http content 12 5 176 Commentary The essential nature of healthcare databases in critical care medicine Greg S Martin Department of Medicine Division of Pulmonary Allergy and Critical Care Emory University School of Medicine 49 Jesse Hill Jr Drive SE Atlanta GA 30303 USA Corresponding author Greg S Martin Published 1 September 2008 This article is online at http content 12 5 176 2008 BioMed Central Ltd Critical Care 2008 12 176 doi cc6993 See related research by Misset et al. http content 12 4 R95 Abstract Medical databases serve a critical function in healthcare including the areas of patient care administration research and education. The quality and breadth of information collected into existing databases varies tremendously between databases between institutions and between national boundaries. The field of critical care medicine could be advanced substantially by the development of comprehensive and accurate databases. Accurate and comprehensive healthcare data are vitally important for a variety of purposes as clearly stated in the newly released article examining diagnostic coding in intensive care patients 1 . These data may be used for local assessments or evaluations within a healthcare system such as for specific outpatient conditions or inpatient hospital events. The data may also be used regionally or nationally for assessing performance within or across healthcare systems. Also while comparisons become enormously difficult administrative data may be used for comparing across national boundaries to assess international differences in healthcare and disease. Administrative healthcare databases are uniquely suited to epidemiological studies of disease particularly for studying the incidence or outcome of rare diseases that are impossible to study locally or within traditional cohort studies 2 . Such data are also uniquely suited to understanding secular trends in disease .