QARS turns 10!
The CEC’s Quality Audit Reporting System (QARS) celebrates an important milestone this month. Ten years ago, in June 2014, the CEC launched QARS Audit to help improve the quality and safety of healthcare provided by NSW Health entities. Today, QARS Audit has close to 94,000 users across the state and is accompanied by a further three modules, and a suite of other CEC applications.
CEC Chief Executive Michael Nicholl said, “It started a decade ago with QARS. We now have a range of databases, applications and systems that we have built and maintain, which help us harness and distribute important information across the system.”
“With QARS and the Quality Improvement Data System (QIDS) that we launched three years later, in June 2017, clinicians and their teams have direct access and the capability to interpret intelligent insights derived from real-time data to make their hospitals safer,” said Prof Nicholl.
“QIDS Maternity Intelligence System (MatIQ), which we launched in 2020, has been described as pioneering and world-leading. It provides data to clinicians on 100% of births in NSW public hospitals in near real-time to help improve outcomes for mothers and babies across the state.”
When combined, triangulated data – that is, multiple methods and sources in one – along with connected technologies and real-time insights enable the CEC to provide a predictive and proactive approach to safety.
Kathryn Inman and Mary Bond of Hunter New England Local Health District’s Clinical Governance team, said, “QARS is a fantastic system that generates different, specific reports for each audit tool.
“The platform enables all NSW Health staff to operate from the one system for audit response capture, collection of data and the provision of graphed data images along with compliance rates. This supports the individual local areas to see where they are going well and also the opportunities for targeted improvement.
“From a district perspective, we can see, as a whole organisation, how we are performing. This information adds to other clinical information and helps us understand how safe we are as an organisation,” said Ms Inman and Ms Bond.
Snapshot of the CEC's analytics and reporting milestones 2014-2024
Quality Audit Reporting System (QARS)
QARS has four modules, as follows:
- QARS Audit is used to collect data that will help to support safety and quality processes. This may include measuring existing and emerging healthcare issues, such as governance and assurance. An audit or survey can also be used by a health entity to meet its accreditation requirements under the National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards of the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care.
- QARS Survey is a secure tool used for all kinds of survey in NSW Health, including patient surveys
- QARS ReACT is used by the CEC’s Critical Response Unit as a statewide communication and coordination tool to manage, escalate and proactively respond to emerging patient safety issues and clinical risks involving medical devices, medicines and biological agents.
- QARS Forms is for CEC internal-use only and aims to streamline the development, use, approval and record management of team and organisational forms.
Quality Improvement Data System (QIDS)
QIDS is a platform and a tool for processing and presenting data, and sharing information to assist clinicians and managers with patient safety and quality improvement activities. It allows users to translate raw data into insights such as current outcomes and trends over time.
QIDS Maternity Intelligence System (MatIQ)
QIDS MatIQ provides near real-time maternal and newborn data insights back to clinicians. The QIDS MatIQ visualisations (trend and multilocation reports) are up to date (containing data from births that occurred as recently as last week) and can be customised to local needs.
More information on QIDS, QARS and MatIQ is available from the CEC’s website.