In the last couple of posts, I’ve written about clinical decision making and the way that physicians at Queens make day to day decisions about individual patient care. That’s something that I’ve noticed during the time I’ve spent in the wards, but in the CPAP office, I’ve also noticed how increasing availability of information leads to better ideas and outcomes for programs like the CPAP implementation project.

Last week, Tanya and I spent a lot of time in Chatinkha Nursery, the equivalent to the neonatal intensive care unit, working on a project to create a system of identifying jaundiced babies. While we were there, Florence, one of the CPAP nurses that has been with the project since 2012 when it began, mentioned that she had been thinking more about the CPAP Coordinator Meeting which she had attended with us as a CPAP mentor.

Since the CPAP project is based out of Queens, the hospital doesn’t have an official coordinator position, but most people would agree that Florence is the unofficial coordinator here. She had wanted to present the Chatinkha CPAP data at the meeting, but she didn’t currently have a way of compiling her data in a simple, straightforward way. So with that information in mind, I’ve been working on creating an Excel template for her where she can input patient totals by diagnoses and outcomes to automatically generate survival rates and trend graphs looking at several aspects of CPAP care.

Each month, inputting the totals from her handwritten log book will take her between 5-10 minutes, and the monthly summary will give her a graphical representation of how Chatinkha is performing when it comes to CPAP and oxygen patients. In addition, at the end of the year, the template takes the numbers from each month and generates a yearly report to show trends across a longer block of time. The summaries are geared towards giving Florence and other coordinators the information with which to critically evaluate their nursery’s CPAP performance and make changes or continue successful practices accordingly.

As Alfred and Norman repeatedly stressed at the Coordinator Meeting, data is a powerful tool for advocates of neonatal care. Hopefully, this template can be a sustainable tool for CPAP coordinators to document the strengths and weaknesses of their implementation efforts, not only to identify areas for improvement but to identify which strategies have worked best for bettering patient outcomes in the long term.