Clinical outcome monitoring program (COMP): a new application for use in orthodontic audits and research.

Awareness has been growing in recent years about the importance of clinical auditing to provide better orthodontic care to patients. A new, flexible software package, Clinical outcomes monitoring program (COMP), designed to facilitate clinical audits and research, is described. COMP is simple and easy to use and allows clinicians to gather a full data set with the PAR, ICON, or IOTN indexes and to accurately describe clinical outcome and activity. An audit was carried out to demonstrate the use of the software. A total of 205 consecutively finished patients from Good Hope Hospital, Sutton Coldfield, United Kingdom, were analyzed with the software. General and personal trends for 2 clinicians working in a multioperator unit were examined. Results for the unit showed an average PAR improvement of 77.5%, with clinician A performing marginally better overall than clinician B. A general tendency to be less efficient at improving the right, rather than the left, molar relationship was identified. This problem was particularly evident for clinician B, who achieved on average only a 10% improvement in this area. We conclude that COMP is potentially a useful and powerful tool to facilitate orthodontic audits and research.