Measuring resident physicians' performance of preventive care. Comparing chart review with patient survey.

Background: The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education has suggested various methods for evaluation of practice-based learning and improvement competency, but data on implementation of these methods are limited.

Objective: To compare medical record review and patient surveys on evaluating physician performance in preventive services in an outpatient resident clinic.

Design: Within an ongoing quality improvement project, we collected baseline performance data on preventive services provided for patients at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Internal Medicine Residents' ambulatory clinic.

Participants: Seventy internal medicine and medicine-pediatrics residents from the UAB Internal Medicine Residency program.

Measurements: Resident- and clinic-level comparisons of aggregated patient survey and chart documentation rates of (1) screening for smoking status, (2) advising smokers to quit, (3) cholesterol screening, (4) mammography screening, and (5) pneumonia vaccination.

Results: Six hundred and fifty-nine patient surveys and 761 charts were abstracted. At the clinic level, rates for screening of smoking status, recommending mammogram, and for cholesterol screening were similar (difference <5%) between the 2 methods. Higher rates for pneumonia vaccination (76% vs 67%) and advice to quit smoking (66% vs 52%) were seen on medical record review versus patient surveys. However, within-resident (N=70) comparison of 2 methods of estimating screening rates contained significant variability. The cost of medical record review was substantially higher ($107 vs $17/physician).

Conclusions: Medical record review and patient surveys provided similar rates for selected preventive health measures at the clinic level, with the exception of pneumonia vaccination and advising to quit smoking. A large variation among individual resident providers was noted.