Quality tool from Steno helps to build capacity among Indian doctors

Steno Diabetes Center has developed a new PC tool to help doctors improve quality of care in India. The new tool is called Steno Quality Assurance Tool or simply SQAT.

By Philip Munch, 13 September 2011

“The tool is a great capacity builder. It’s an assessment tool that captures the process and creates real practice change”, says leading Indian endocrinologist and chairman of the SQAT executive committee, AK Das.

In India, doctors only have a few minutes for each patient and patients often shop around many different doctors with a piece of paper with their latest measurements. It’s a condition that makes it hard to improve care and follow progress.

The new PC tool, SQAT, helps the doctors to assess basic process indicators such as the examination of eyes, feet and lipids and the measurement of blood pressure, as well as the measuring of outcome indicators such as fasting glucose levels and HbA1c levels. SQAT has already been tested in 21 clinics in India.
 
“The doctors were really ‘ignited’ by it. They can see how the sofware improves quality in the process and quality in the outcome. And patients are more likely to come back to the same clinic and take part in the care,” says AK Das.

Even though no results have yet been published, AK Das recommends rolling SQAT out in all 32 states in India. He proposes a model where two key doctors from every state in India get trained in the software and become ambassadors in their state.

During July and August, Chief Pysician Ulla Bjerre Christensen and Head of Quality Anne Mette Anker Nielsen from Steno Diabetes Center have been analysing data from the clinics. Together, they initiated the project in 2009.

Based upon the input from the Indian doctors, SQAT has been updated and is now part of a quality assessment program that Steno Education Center has initiated. The first course will take place on the 27-28 of August in Goa where 60 Indian doctors mainly from Goa will be taught how to assess quality in a daily clinical setting.

“The doctors will be trained in a 2-day intensive course. The teaching is very interactive, primarily hands on and workshop based”, says Ulla Bjerre Christensen.

Goa is a state that has already been successful working with quality of care. But this is not the case in most Indian states and in many developing countries in general:

“Quality assurance of diabetes treatment is still a future scenario. So the greatest challenge for the program is actually to create awareness and understanding for the necessity of monitoring treatment on a continous basis”, says Ulla Bjerre Christensen.

It is the ambition for the coming years to further disseminate SQAT and the concept of monitoring clinical quality, including developing research collaborations, in other parts of the world.