RESEARCH ARTICLE


Quality Control Techniques and Standards Implemented in the WEBBased “Susy Safe” Registry



Paola Berchialla1, §, Arber Haxhiaj2, Desiderio Passali3, Hugo Rodriguez4, §, Dario Gregori5, §, *
1 Department of Public Health and Microbiology, University of Torino, Torino, Italy
2 Prochild ONLUS, Trieste, Italy
3 Ear, Nose, and Throat Clinic, Policlinico Le Scotte, University of Siena, Italy
4 Endoscopy, Hospital de Pediatría Juan P. Garrahan, Buenos Aires, Argentina
5 Laboratory of Epidemiological Methods and Biostatistics, Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, University of Padova, Padova, Italy

Article Information


Identifiers and Pagination:

Year: 2012
Volume: 6
First Page: 29
Last Page: 37
Publisher Id: TOPEDJ-6-29
DOI: 10.2174/1874309901206010029

Article History:

Received Date: 11/01/2012
Revision Received Date: 15/02/2012
Acceptance Date: 15/02/2012
Electronic publication date: 4/5/2012
Collection year: 2012

© 2012 Berchialla et al.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                                              §                         Paola Berchialla, Hugo Rodriguez and Dario Gregori are Guest Editors for the issue.                                         * Address correspondence to this author at the Labs of Epidemiological Methods and Biostatistics, Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, University of Padova, Via Loredan 18, 35131 Padova, Italy; Tel: +39 049 8275384; Fax: +39 02 700445089; dario.gregori@unipd.it


Abstract

The “Susy Safe” project is a European, WEB-based Registry (www.susysafe.org) aimed at collecting data regarding injuries caused by foreign bodies in the upper aero-digestive tract, occurred to children between 0 and 14 years of age. In most of the situations, injury registries are lacking an appropriate mechanism to control the data quality, mostly due to the low incidence of such events and to the corresponding high variability in the doctors reporting about the injury. In the Susy Safe registry, quality is a priority. Therefore, in order to monitor quality both automated and manual data inspections are used. There are automated checks which are based on classical data-entry controls and innovative statistical techniques mimicked from the industrial quality control. The manual inspections are conducted by dedicated medical doctors who check all cases that have an insufficient quality score obtained in the automated control. Having a centralized database and a Web access system, the quality control (QC) process becomes more flexible, improving its accuracy and reducing both the number of persons involved and the necessary time for its accomplishment.

Keywords: Quality Assurance, Quality Control, Foreign body injury.