Quality control in management of pain.

Since 1987 several pain clinics in The Netherlands have started with some kind of computer-assisted recording of data, mainly for purposes of quality control. However, this has not yet led to routinely generated reports about the quality of these clinics because a consensus on how to assess quality in pain-treatment is missing. Using classical system-development methods a global specification for an information system for quality assessment was defined on which a prototype application was based. Various changes were adopted into this prototype, which ultimately resulted in explicit requirements stating: 1. Which data to record, 2. What organisational prerequisites to fulfil for such a system, 3. The user-interface, and 4. Interactions with other information systems. The final application was implemented in a number of pain clinics where its usefulness in quality control is currently assessed.