Speech language pathologists are good at collecting data: for accountability and to justify our treatment decisions. The Affordable Care Act and Medicare require us to detect, measure and represent progress, and to use the most effective treatments to ensure that progress will be made.
But with the right tools, data collection can play a more fundamental role in our daily clinical decision making.
State of Data Tracking in Current Clinical Practic
In order to effect systemic change in practice, the right set of tools and resources needed to be available and easy to incorporate into existing practice and produce better results than what is found in current clinical practice. Here are our some of our findings about the ways current clinical practice impacts the ways in which we use data from our clinical practice.
We are locked into 20th century, paper-based data accounting practices
As clinicians it’s difficult to remember the details of every clinical encounter. Few of us possess the ability to recall a detailed history of our clinical actions in a way that allows us to inspect them for signs of clinical change.
The application of effective data collection, visualization and accounting will transform modern clinical practice
We believe that modern data visualization techniques, coupled with single case graphs will provide clinicians with the ability to leverage their tracking activities into powerful evidence-based clinical decision making tools. In order to make this happen,
“Without data, informed decisions concerning client management cannot be made”[Olswang and Bain, 1994, p.55] [ We need a rollover popup to show the reference or important note ]
Speech-language pathologists regularly collect data to justify their treatment decisions, enable billing, and pass audits. But nowadays, accountability isn’t enough. Practitioners need to use their client’s performance data to make informed clinical decisions.
