Clinicians manage a lot of data - on assorted bits of paper and in their heads. This book is about better ways to manage and understand large amounts of clinical data. Following on from his ground breaking book, Evaluating the Processes of Neonatal Intensive Care, Joseph Schulman has produced this eminently readable guide to patient data analysis. He demystifies the technical methodology to make this crucial aspect of good clinical practice understandable and usable for all health care workers.

Computer technology has been relatively slow to transform the daily work of health care, the way it has transformed other professions that work with large amounts of data. Each day, we do our work as we did it the day before, even though current technology offers much better ways.

Here are much better ways to document and learn from the daily work of clinical care. Here are the principles of data management and analysis and detailed examples of how to implement them using computer technology.

To show you that the knowledge is scalable and useful, and to get you off to a running start, the book includes a complete point of care database software application tailored to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).

With examples from the NICU and the pediatric ward, this book is aimed specifically at the neonatal and pediatric teams. The accompanying software can be downloaded on to your system or PDA, so that continual record assessment becomes second nature – a skill that will immeasurably improve practice and outcomes for all your patients.