Documenting Patient Care: The Path to High-Quality Health Indicators
High-quality health system data informs decision-making and helps us measure health system performance. To guarantee better data quality, it’s important to start at the source: the patient chart.
Clinicians play an important role as a source of health data. They document symptoms, diagnoses, comorbidities and medical history in patient charts. This information is used to develop comparable and actionable health indicators, which influence how care is delivered, ultimately leading to better health outcomes.
CIHI collaborates with health stakeholders, including clinicians, to help build their capacity to chart key health conditions and diagnoses, and to capture comorbidities that can affect many health outcomes.
Use the tools and resources on this page and share them in your organization.
Featured resource
How do clinicians drive quality improvement and better patient outcomes? Watch our video, Charting the Path to Better Patient Care.
Additional resources
- How is clinical documentation transformed into health data? (PDF)
- Patient chart checklist - poster (PDF)
- Patient chart checklist - pocket card (PDF)
Related links
- Data and Information Quality
- Health Indicators
- Codes and Classifications
- Canadian Health Information Management Association External link, opens in new window
Questions or feedback
We’d love to hear from you. Contact us at hspschool@cihi.ca.
If you would like CIHI information in a different format, visit our Accessibility page.