Make good with imperfect data

Paul Mayeda

PAUL MAYEDA, MD

Fam Pract Manag. 1998;5(8):10

To the Editor:

“It's Time to Start Practicing Population-Based Health Care” (June 1998) was a great article — very applicable to family practice. The advent of computerized record keeping will facilitate more of this everyday practice.

One of the most helpful points in the article was, to plagiarize from Nike, “Just do it.” I think those of us who are interested in quality improvement on the office-based-practice level can get hung up on trying to have complete databases and comprehensive data. While this might be nice in a pure sense, the interventions we may make even with less-than-complete information will have an impact for the better.

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