At the Chester Community Physical Therapy Clinic, we have been putting together some systems for tracking and presenting patient progress through consistent outcome measures. This can be difficult with multiple students treating and evaluating the same patient throughout their course of care, and multiple students with different experiences. Please share any experiences your clinics might have with tracking outcomes, any successes or struggles.  

In the CPPTC (Community participatory PT Clinic, RU Newark) we have a few Outcomes initiatives.
First our charts are audited by the 3rd year students as part of the DPT Outcomes course. From that audit, each year several recommendations are made to improve operations and data management. For example, our documentation notes (very iterative process) change according to recommendations based off of the most recent audit. This year we added the Patient Specific Functional Scale for every patient/client; and on the IE and progress note a special area which states please complete appropriate outcome tool: ___; we have 10 specific tools that were recommended by the student board in agreement with the Outcome course recommendations; (oswestry, . PENn shld etc). This by no means creates increase use of these tools :) But we are working on that!
One last hope for increasing the use outcome measures and of tracking outcomes in the CPPTC is the use of a HOST who greets a patient and sets up the clinicians for the session. The HOST will review the case history and reinforce the outcome tool use that was recommended prior or that they deem necessary for the patient case. Stay tuned for this year's success...
Hope this helps. SueP (paparesu@shp.rutgers.edu)