Once a
practice is confident that its disease register is up to date, an audit set of
Miquest queries for the condition can be run. The practice can request this by
downloading from the website or by phone to the PCAG office.
The
queries are run either immediately or overnight according to the instructions
available on the download page. The result files are then sent to PCAG for
analysis by email or disc. The PCAG will return an Excel spreadsheet containing
the audit results via disc or email, according to practice preference. The
spreadsheet contains several sheets. The sheet DATA contains the raw data for
the audit criteria, broken down by age and sex. From this sheet are derived the
summary sheets for different projects. The Sheets PCAG and PCAG1 contain
anonymised comparative data for other practices in a peer group chosen by the
practice. A practice could request its data is fed back compared with its PCT or
all Leicester practices etc. Where a practice has completed an audit cycle the
data from the previous phase of the audit cycle is also compared. The
interpretation of this data forms the basis of future action planning by the
practice. An NSF sheet is also supplied where appropriate, returning the
relevant NSF data.
The
query set first creates lists of the relevant groups of patients whose records
are to be audited. Subsequent queries carry out the audits generating age sex
breakdowns for the audit criteria or further subsets of patients for more
detailed audit. Each query only deals with a small area of the audit, which is
why the query sets as a whole run to many queries.