Healthcare Audit: An Essential Activity for the Quality and Reliability of Care

Abstract

We should begin by commenting that the word audit comes from the Latin audire (to hear), since in antiquity, public accounts were presented in this way.

Nowadays, this audit focused on health care, which also has other names such as medical audit, hospital audit or clinical audit, is a systematic procedure that makes it possible to establish how a particular situation, a department or an organization works through the analysis of its data, as it applies to both the individual and the collective, to the simple or the complex. By means of the audit, the results are contrasted against objective criteria with respect to national or international standards, in order to determine whether they meet those requirements.