Abstract: A computer-implemented method for tracking of clinical, demographic, financial and service metrics within a physician practice and comparing such metrics to other physician practices comprising: running a data collection service in the background on at least two separate physician practice modules wherein the data collection service collects data from the particular module on which it is running; establishing a communication mechanism between each data collection service and a host module; at the host module, collecting the data from the data collection services by transmitting the data from the data collection services via the communication mechanism to the host module; storing the data in the host module; comparing the data in the host module against best practices data stored in the host module wherein for each of a predetermined set of data metrics, the best practices data associated with that data metric is computed in relation to the data collected for a plurality of practices reporting that data metric