Thinking Ahead—Outcome Measures
Gaining clarity on the data that will need to be collected to evaluate practice change should be done during the initial planning stage of the project, before implementing the intervention. Your practice setting may provide options for collecting data from various sources, such as EHR, admissions and discharges, and morbidity and mortality reports. If not, you will need to determine what data you need, when it should be collected, who will collect it, and how you will collect it. In addition, you will need to determine how it will be analyzed.
To prepare:
Review the Synthesis Table you created in Submissions Area for your project and compare the result with the desired outcome from your PICOT question.
Identify outcome measures that you will monitor as indicators of practice change, deciding how the data will be collected (pre- and posttests of participants, EHR, admission and discharge data, etc.) and analyzed.