A new quality improvement study every day? Using QTools to build quality improvement projects around primary care electronic medical record systems.

Greater and more appropriate use of information technology has been proposed by the US Institute of Medicine as one way in which the quality of health care can be improved. Electronic medical record systems offer particular advantages because they can support clinicians at the point of care as well as allowing patient care to be monitored over time. Developing quality improvement tools that make use of the electronic medical record can, however, be difficult and often requires special software. This paper describes a system called QTools that provides a range of general-purpose tools to support quality improvement work in Norwegian primary care. The paper discusses how QTools has been used in two studies involving over 100,000 patient consultations and how it is supporting current work to improve the prescription of anti-hypertensive drugs. Features that have not yet been used in a quality improvement study are also discussed.