Quality Assurance

The Sentient Quality Assurance Program was instituted in 2006.

Currently the Quality Assurance Program comprises five full time personnel. The Quality Assurance Committee meets monthly to review reports on clinician performance, alerts and adverse outcomes in addition to other matters that affect the delivery of care. The committee is chaired by the Chief Medical Officer. Committee decisions are relayed to the Education Department, the Information Technology department, the Clinical Managers, and where required directly to the individual clinician and followed by the Chief Medical Officer to ensure effective and prompt response where and when necessary.

Surgical Neurophysiologist Quality Assurance

 Surgical neurophysiologist quality assurance is a two tiered process.

First, on-line real time quality assurance is part of the consulting neurologist's oversight responsibility during supervision of cases with the surgical neurophysiologist. In this situation there is contact in real time during the case; signal to noise ratio and signal quality, modality appropriateness and monitoring choices are reviewed with the surgical neurophysiologist in the light of the diagnosis, procedure, pre-existing clinical condition of the patient and anesthetic requirement.

Second, during the reporting of cases by the consulting neurologists, completeness of the surgical neurophysiologist’s documentation, the quality of data reporting in the case event log, waveforms and data capture are assessed for accuracy, adherence to protocols, completeness and technical quality.

A database of  Quality Assurance issues is maintained by the Chief Medical Officer and the Quality Assurance program staff. Follow up regarding incidents is made either through the Chief Medical Officer, The Chief Operating Officer, the Director of the Sentient Education Program and/or the Clinical Manager as required.

Consulting Neurologist Quality Assurance

Consulting Neurologist quality assurance includes in-depth reviews of cases supervised. 

Each quarter, approximately 2-5% of the total cases monitored by each consulting neurologist and representative of the case mix for that physician are randomly selected and reviewed for completeness as well as for accuracy, measuring the following components: completeness of demographic and administrative data, adequacy of the description of the monitoring procedures, appropriateness of selection of modalities for neurophysiological monitoring, report quality, notation and reporting of significant electrophysiological changes, appropriateness and accuracy of interpretation of same.

A database of  Quality Assurance issues is maintained by the Chief Medical Officer and the Quality Assurance program staff. Follow up and additional training is made by the Chief Medical Officer or the Director of the Sentient Education Program as required.

 

 

 

 

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