RESUMEN
Objective: 1. To audit the management of surgical patients by computer system. 2. To collect the problems of data analysis for auditing the management of surgical patientsDesign: Retrospective, descriptive study.Setting: Department of surgical, Faculty of Medicine, Khon Kaen UniversitySubject: All in-patients of Department of Surgical within 1998.Data collection: Review from computer database.Measurement: Descriptive statistics.Result: Important factor, which can be retrieved from computer database, include age, sex, diagnosis, operation, result, hospital stay, and mortality rate. A total of 6,821 patients was admitted in Department of Surgery during January and December 1998. The male: female ratio was 0.98:1 (3,375:3,446). The mean age of male and female patients was 43.17 and 43.76 years, respectively. The average hospital stay was 9.53 days. There were 1,224 patients (17.94%) who had complications and 6,048 patients (88.67%) had good discharge status. The average hospital mortality was 1.92%Conclusions: Computerized audit of surgical patients can be done much faster than manual audit. The result is highly accurate but may have some mistakes. Misunderstanding, inappropriate coding, unclear wording and input error cause mistakes in the computerized patient records. Some important factors for auditing are not collected in the computer system.Keyword: (1) Computer (2) Audit (3)Surgical patients