Development of the Core Dataset: Qualify assurance in the German intensive care medicine results and experiences of a multi-center study

On behalf of the "German Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care" (DGAI) and in cooperation with the "Commission for Quality Control and Data Processing" in 1994 we started with the project on the development of a Core Dataset for Quality Assurance in the field of Intensive Care Medicine. After a primary definition of the contents and aims of the project, we tested this data set in two succeeding multi-center studies. Based on the know-ledge gained from the first studies we reduced the original data set significantly. With this modified dataset we started a second multi-center study. In a period of 6 months 2383 patients with altogether 15383 days of medical treatment were registered in 21 clinics with different levels of provision, The average documentation time for each patient was 2.5 minutes for the daily documentation. As in the first study the results reveal distinct patterns of the various clinics which can be used for an internal and external comparison, Taken from a significantly bigger collective, the following results of the study can be shown: This concept can be integrated into the daily routine of an ICU very well and the data set enables us to make valid statements regarding internal and external quality assurance.