Monitoring serial changes in health status is one of the principal clinical uses of the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire, the Seattle Angina Questionnaire, and the Peripheral Artery Questionnaire. Such changes can be difficult to perceive in tables of numeric data, but they become obvious when graphed. To facilitate review of individual patient trends at the point of care, we have added graphing capabilities to the our calculation tools — the KCCQ Calculator, the SAQ Calculator, and the PAQ Calculator. Here is information about how this works.

Monitoring serial changes in health status is one of the principal clinical uses of the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire, the Seattle Angina Questionnaire, and the Peripheral Artery Questionnaire. Such changes can be difficult to perceive in tables of numeric data, but they become obvious when graphed. To facilitate review of individual patient trends at the point of care, we have added graphing capabilities to the our calculation tools — the KCCQ Calculator, the SAQ Calculator, and the PAQ Calculator. Here is information about how this works.

Each of these Calculators is a simple but elegant spreadsheet that runs within Microsoft Excel to assist data entry of patient responses, calculate scale scores from the raw responses, generate tabular data collections, and graph results of any patient. These functions are handled in three worksheets within the Calculators — Data Entry, Data, and Graph. (Note: we show the Mac OS X version in the following screenshots, but the Windows version behaves identically and looks nearly the same.)

Data Entry

The basic data entry user interface provides fields for a patient identifier (whatever is appropriate for your deployment) and the date the patient performed the questionnaire, as well as fields for all the questions in the instrument.

Data entry filters insure that only valid dates and valid responses for each question can be entered. Once all the data are typed in, clicking on the “Save Values” button copies the entered values into the Data worksheet along with the calculated scale scores.

Data

The Calculators store accumulating patient data in the “Data” worksheet. Each new result is appended at the bottom of the worksheet as a new row. Columns hold the patient IDs, the study date, the calculated scale scores, and the raw question responses.

These data can then be cut&pasted or exported into other analytical applications. The “Delete All Data” clears the worksheet — after giving appropriate warning about the irreversible nature of this step.

Graphing

The “Graph” worksheet extracts a specific patient’s data from the “Data” worksheet and graphs it. Because often only summary scale results are desired at the point of care, each scale can be selected and deselected individually for inclusion in this report.

Once the scales are selected, clicking on the “Graph” button brings up a dialog box into which the patient’s ID is typed. All rows for this patient are then extracted from the data, sorted into chronological order, and then displayed in both tabular and graphical form.

Printing

This information can be viewed on screen, but more commonly we’ve found that clinical users prefer a printed copy for review with the patient and inclusion in the (paper) chart. The “Graph” worksheet can simply be printed using the Print commands in Excel to generate a nicely-formatted final report.

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