Large-Scale Audits: Using Citizen Science to Gather High-Quality “Big Data”

Key Points

• Large-scale audits have been hugely successful in gathering large volumes of data in short spaces of time to inform research and quality improvement (QI) endeavors and policy development.

• Built on the model of “citizen science,” they harness the efforts of thousands of collaborators to approach a specific challenge, using a collaborative and cost-effective approach.

• Key points for success include choosing topics that are important to collaborators, establishing networks that enable delivery, and keeping the data set as small as possible.