Quality management in the doctor's consulting room.

: Clinical research and the measurement of quality in healthcare have similar properties. Clinical research is generally restricted to university and teaching hospitals because of it's time consuming nature while quality management and subsequent quality measurement are of interest to all medical doctors. To serve both purposes a Kaplan Meier satellite module was developed as an add-on to a medical workstation. Kaplan Meier survival statistics has interesting possibilities as a clinical tool for the measurement and graphic visualisation of quality of care. It does express the clinical behaviour of a patient population in terms of cumulative survival, patency or any other binary phenomenon. A vascular surgeon collected cumulative patency data on 340 vascular reconstructions with this Kaplan Meier module within 6 months without any perceptable influence on the normal outpatient clinic routines. The module is easy to operate, easy to maintain and very adaptable to any clinical question.