Case Study - Nottingham City Hospital East Midlands Quality Assurance

Interval Cancer Audit

Problem

The Trent QA department is required to collate and classify Interval Cancers in order to audit diagnosis of routine mammography screens against the onset of Breast Cancer.

Screening data is made available from a number of sources.

The data will be analysed with products such as MS Excel and other reporting tools.

The data needs to be available to other quality assurance centres regionally and nationally.

Access is restricted depending on user groups, those that can update data and those that can only view the data for reporting purposes.

Solution

A Windows 2000 workstation was connected to the hospital local area network. Also installed were Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database (MSDE version) and the Internet Information Server component for the web-based front-end screens.

A database was designed for SQL Server to store the audit information in a normalised and logically ordered fashion.

Using iCraft's Composer system, browser-based screens were designed for the local website, to provide a front-end to the database. This provides view and manual update facitlities to the database.

An ODBC connector was implemented to provide secure access to the database for data analysis and remote connection.

Backup regimes were instituted with a method to archive the data within the hospital's data backup regime performed by local IT staff.

Usage

Data is now available on any browser configured to be able to access it. Because this product is hosted within an internal network, username and password authentication from the hospital's windows domain are used.

The web-based interface to the data presents a clear representation and order to the collected data. System users may update information with this interface and browse

Data verification makes it difficult to place the incorrect data into any of the table fields.

The ODBC connector provides a method for any compliant reporting applications, such as SPSS and other scientific tools as well as Microsoft Office products.

The dataset is used to provide reports at intervals, using MS Office products.