title: Quality assurance and improvement: the Pediatric Regional Anesthesia Network.
abstract: Quality assurance and improvement (QA/QI) is a critical activity in medicine. The use of large-scale collaborative databases is increasingly essential to obtain enough reports with which to establish standards of practice and define the incidence of complications and risk/benefit ratios for rare events. Such projects can enhance local QA/QI endeavors by enabling institutions to obtain benchmark data against which to compare their performance and can be used for prospective analyses of inter-institutional differences to determine 'best practice'. The pediatric regional anesthesia network (PRAN) is such a project. The first data cohort is currently being analyzed and offers insight into how such data can be used to detect trends in adverse events and improve care.
authors.affiliation: Department of Anesthesiology, Children's Hospital Colorado, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora, CO 80045, USA. David.Polaner@ucdenver.edu
authors.forename: David M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Polaner
authors.forename: Lynn D
authors.initials: LD
authors.lastname: Martin
mesh_terms: D000758:Anesthesia / Q000009:adverse effects; D000765:Anesthesia, Conduction / Q000592:standards*; D000776:Anesthesiology / Q000592:standards*; D000777:Anesthetics / Q000009:adverse effects; D019985:Benchmarking; D002648:Child; D016208:Databases, Factual; D019983:Guideline Adherence; D006801:Humans; D015337:Multicenter Studies as Topic; D010372:Pediatrics / Q000592:standards*; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care / Q000379:methods*; D058996:Quality Improvement
chemical_list: D000777:Anesthetics