Building standards from a guideline

Extracting standards from a document

Rather than typing standards out, upload the guideline. Choose Import from guideline and give it a PDF. Rhazes reads it and proposes a set of audit standards drawn from it.

You then pick which of them to add. Nothing goes into your audit until you select it.

Why this is the better starting point

Turning a guideline into audit criteria by hand is slow and lossy. You work from the sections you remember, and the criteria that end up in the proforma are the ones that were easy to phrase rather than the ones that matter.

Starting from extraction inverts that. You get the full set proposed and your job becomes editing and rejecting, which is a much easier task than composing from a blank page.

Always review what comes out

Treat extracted standards as a first draft. Read every one you accept, and expect to edit most of them:

• Is it answerable from a record? A guideline recommendation is not automatically an auditable standard.
• Are the inclusion criteria right for your service? Extraction works from the guideline, which does not know your ward, your period or your population.
• Are the exceptions complete? The guideline may state them loosely, or not at all.
• Is the target yours? Set it to what your service is held to.

See Writing an audit standard.

Attaching a reference guideline to a standard

Separately from extraction, each standard can carry a reference guideline document of its own. Upload it on the standard, and Rhazes uses it when validating compliance for that standard.

This is worth doing where the standard is a summary of something more detailed. "Was antibiotic choice appropriate" depends entirely on a formulary, and attaching that formulary is what turns a judgement call into one anchored in your local policy.

Where a standard is self-contained, such as whether an observation was documented within 24 hours, a reference document adds nothing.