Using health care audit to improve quality of clinical records: the preliminary experience of an Italian Cancer Institute.

Introduction: Audit and feedback are recognized as part of a strategy for improving performance and supporting quality and safety in European health care systems. These considerations led the Clinical Management Staff of the "Regina Elena" Italian Cancer Institute to start a project of self-assessment of the quality of clinical records and organizational appropriateness through a retrospective review.

Materials And Methods: The evaluation about appropriateness and congruity concerned both clinical records of 2013 and of 2015.

[The Day Service as a tool to reduce inappropriateness of care: the experience of a research hospital in Rome (Italy)].

The Day Service was established in Italy to promote appropriateness of care and consists in the delivery of packages of complex outpatient services. A Working Group for the continuous improvement of pre-hospitalization activities of the Regina Elena Scientific Institute in Rome, Italy, established that the outpatient management of surgical patients in the hospital would occur in a Day Service, through a package of services identified at the regional level or appropriate diagnostic and therapeutic pathways. This article describes the experience of the hospital's Day Service and compares results from the last four months of 2013 with those of the first four months of 2014.