The effect of continuous quality improvement on compliance with clinical practice guidelines in an optometric clinic: a retrospective review.
BACKGROUND: Quantitative documentation of quality is becoming increasingly more important. The SUNY State College of Optometry established clinical protocols outlining clinical standards for patient care. We compared documentation of actual clinical performance to these standards. METHODS: The Primary Care Service's Quality Management Team retrospectively reviews a random 10% sample of charts of patients seen in the teaching clinic of the SUNY State College of Optometry on an ongoing basis. They compare the care documented in the medical record to internally distributed clinical protocols. We reviewed the resultant data from January 1995 through June 1997 by analyzing the number of indicators that were out of compliance for each month. Then we graphed these data to ascertain trends and variability to determine what effect this continuous quality improvement process had on clinical care as measured by compliance with clinical protocols. RESULTS: A least-squares regression analysis demonstrated a correlation (0.717) between the decreasing number of items out of compliance and the time during which feedback was provided (r2 = 0.5143, p = 0.0001). These data show a distinct downward trend, indicating better compliance with the clinical protocols over time. We also found that the variability of the data decreased during the time period studied. CONCLUSIONS: A properly designed continuous quality improvement program that gives appropriate feedback to faculty optometrists and student interns measurably increased their compliance with--and decreased their variability from--this clinic's internally distributed clinical protocols over a 30-month time period.