You work at a small community-based hospital as a manager in the quality assurance department. One function of your job is to analyze internal data such as medical records, patient surveys, and incident reports to track trends and help improve patient care delivery. Your supervisor just came back from a seminar on quality benchmarking and has asked about your thoughts on analyzing secondary data from the health care industry as a way to benchmark and measure the organization's quality performance against its peers. You have been asked to prepare a report on the use of both secondary data and internal data as way to improve quality in your organization. Complete the following:

Write a paper comparing and contrasting the collection of secondary data and their uses versus the analysis of current health care records and internal data such as incident reports and patient surveys.

Explain how health care organizations use secondary data as a comparison to internal data.

Assess the validity and reliability of primary and secondary data in conducting health care research.