Warfarin Patient Safety audit tool new version now available

Users of the popular Warfarin Patient Safety audit tool will be pleased to hear that the tool has had an upgrade and this new version is now available (March 2015).

Warfarin Patient Safety is an entirely free-to-use audit tool. All that is required to obtain the audit tool is a free basic PRIMIS Hub membership and the software tool, CHART, which is also available without charge from PRIMIS. 

Warfarin Patient Safety is designed to help practices to audit their clinical data to look at the appropriateness of warfarin prescribing. The tool will assist practices in examining whether patients are achieving the optimum benefit from taking warfarin by calculating the amount of time their International Normalised Ratio (INR) is within therapeutic range. 

The improvements to the tool are:

• calculations in the data sheet now feature CHA₂DS₂VASc, which has replaced CHADS₂ to reflect changes made in the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) in regards to atrial fibrillation

• results in the summary sheet now highlight percentage time in therapeutic range (TTR) using a 65% value, rather than 70%. This change was made to reflect the NICE recommendation that any patient with a TTR below 65% should have anticoagulation reassessed. (Please see NICE Atrial fibrillation: the management of atrial fibrillation. NICE guidelines CG180. Published June 2014. www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg180)

• CHART Online functionality has been added. Please note: practices can upload but will not be able to see results until there has been sufficient data submitted to populate the online views.
  
  NB: CHART Online is a data storage facility with associated online reporting and display functionality that allows benchmarking and comparison both locally and nationally of pseudonymised audit tool results. You can find out more about CHART Online on the PRIMIS website.

Development of the tool

The development of the Warfarin Patient Safety audit tool has been funded by Boehringer Ingelheim. Boehringer Ingelheim has undertaken a medico legal review but PRIMIS has retained editorial control and intellectual property right for this audit tool.

How to obtain Warfarin Patient Safety

All PRIMIS Hub members can obtain this new version of Warfarin Patient Safety by using the ‘Check for updates’ link in CHART. The new version is available for your immediate download and use.

To sign up as a PRIMIS Hub member please join online.

Once a member, follow the instructions in your joining email to download and install CHART – and find more information online about using CHART and PRIMIS audit tools.

More information

Please see the dedicated webpage for Warfarin Patient Safety for more information, documentation and details on how to obtain the tool.