Sorry for the mid-week hiatus in email replies. Turns out that running the Heads’n'Tails match this week produced a series of problems that took quite a while to fix. Most importantly older matches were being dropped from the heads and tails reports. I think this is because there is a cooling off period that stops us looking at recently modified records.
Anyhow, I have tried to put together a work around but let me know if things don’t seem quite right.
Steve
Why week 1 of 12? Because we are setting the deadline for final submission of (SPOT)light data to March 31 2012. All sites have completed data collection, and the only factor now outside of our control is the timing of the submission of the Case Mix Programme (CMP) data that is used for matching. This is supposed to be submitted quarterly so since all sites finished last quarter then the corresponding CMP should be submitted over the next few weeks.
March 31 is less than 3 months away hence the countdown. I’ll try and post once a week about progress, and turn around submitted matching reports or DVR queries on a weekly basis.
I had hoped to send a mail shot out alerting everyone to the DVR which is now live, but I started preparing the first pages of the site report and this took longer than I had planned.
The DVR mail shot should now go out on Monday. This is not altogether bad as there is one annoying bug on the website at the moment which reports errors (accurately) but does not indicate which field is causing the problem. The IT team have done a great job in sorting this one out, but it seemed sensible not to push everyone to look at the DVR before this was fixed.
Happy New Year! And I hope you are looking forward to the (SPOT)light results as much as I am!
Q: Why are you asking me to confirm a blank field?
A: Nearly all the fields on the web site have a ‘Not available’ checkbox attached, and when you have checked this then we will not be asking you for further information. However, if the field is blank and the box is unchecked then we need to be sure that form is complete and the data is truly unavailable.
The only other time we will ask is where there are also ‘drop-down’ lists since these do not have paired ‘Not available’ checkboxes. The only way that we can be sure that the data in these fields is truly unavailable is by asking you to confirm this.
You will see a two clipboard icons on the web portal. These buttons are not yet ready for public release but we thought we would let you know what they will do in advance.
The clipboard with the question mark is the button to produce your hospital’s Data Validation Report.
The clipboard with the exclamation mark should list all patients not meeting the minimum data set standard.
So the new Heads’n'Tails matching is ready. Hooray! I will be sending out your individual site sheets over the next few days. Please also have a look at the guidance notes.
I know you are waiting for the next Heads’n'Tails report which I had hoped to be able to produce within a month of the first which would have been mid-September. We are now at the beginning of October, and I am still working on this. It has not been as simple as re-running the matching process because we have been trying to incorporate a number of improvements.
Most importantly, you should be able in the next report to see the issues month by month. We think this will help identify months which are close to being complete. Missing matches from these months can then be prioritised so that as much of your data is ready for analysis as soon as possible.
Thanks for being patient.
The next report is coming soon …
Next Tuesday we will be upgrading the (SPOT)light website. The main change is that your records will be sorted by month. The default view when you click through will show you ALL patients from the last 30 days. If you want to look further back then hover over the ‘Last 30 days’ and you will be able to choose the month your wish to view.
Just as before you can similarly select whether you are looking at ‘Open’ visits (those where the patient was neither discharged from follow-up nor admitted to ICU) via the same approach.
Please also note that long lists of patients are now broken up by pages using the icons in the top right.
Young patients with apparently severe pneumonia are frequently not making the CURB-65 criteria. The current protocol also permits patients to be entered if the SOFA score is ≥1 on the calendar of the chest x-ray so please consider this too. Check out the online calculator.
A previous blog post mentioned that one site was asking the medical staff to fill in a ‘postcard’ when they saw a referral. It’s pocket size, and the site was collating them so that the junior doc’s could use the information towards their log books at the end of their job. Here is an updated version for you to download. Please let me know if it helps.
A data collection problem has recently come to our attention at one of the (SPOT)light sites.
Please do let us know as soon as possible if this affects your data.
Steve (on behalf of the (SPOT)light team)