Quality control in the hospital discharge survey.

ing, and medical abstracting, respectively. It can be seen that the overall quality attained in the two abstracting phases was well within the established standards and resulted in acceptable decisions on each phase in excess of 92 percent. Although the overall quality of the sample seleetion operation was not as good as anticipated (2.18 percent vs 1.00 percent), the acceptable quality rate of 88 percent was good. As the boxes on these tables show, hospitals that had unacceptable quality during the initial visit showed substantial improvement at the revisit, indicating the effectiveness of the retraining provided them. Table J shows the number of abstracts containing at least one abstracting error. There were 2,254 items in error (868 from table G and 1,386 from table H), giving an average of 1.22 item errors for each error abstract. Table J. Summary of abstracts in error’ in 1973 Total number of records abstracted (for 421hospitals visited) . . . . . . . . . Number of abstracts containing no errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Number of abstracts containing one error ormore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Percant of abstracts containing one error ormore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Total number of records abstracted (for 28hospitals revisitad) . . . . . . . . Number of abstracts containing no errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Number of abstracts containing one error ormore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Parcent of abstracts containing one arroror more . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Initial Visit