In general when we're doing audits, we still see many problems with how departments are collecting and managing data. I think, though, that the committee has been successful in starting to shed some light on this, and departments are starting to take it more seriously. However, I don't think it is yet showing up in our audits.
In this particular audit, I would like to point out that there were some places where we saw that the department was doing some good things with data, and then some places where they needed to improve in data.
The department has a lot of data about individual payments for individual services. When dentists are providing individual services and those services are being paid for through the department's program, they have a lot of data on that. They have done a lot of analysis on that data to make sure dentists are only claiming what they should and people are only getting paid what they should. They've been collecting a lot of data. That data is accurate, and they've been using that data to make sure that payments are appropriate. They haven't been using the data sufficiently to manage the outcomes, to manage what this data can tell us about dental health outcomes and how we can use that data to improve that.
Similarly, on something like the children's oral health initiative, they don't have the information about individual services because the department doesn't pay for each individual service. It pays for a hygienist, perhaps to go into an area in some of these programs. The hygienist gets paid, but not necessarily on an individual service, so they don't have as much information. That's why when we talk about the children's oral health program and there appears to be some data quality issues, it's because they don't collect the same level of data.
They're doing a good job on some of it, where they have the individual transactions. They need to use that information to get more insight out of that information. Then, in some of these other places, they just need to do a better job on collecting information in general.