Representation System of Quality Indicators towards Accurate Evaluation of Medical Services Based on Medical Databases

摘要

Quality indicators play an important role in quantitatively measuring the quality of medical services. In this paper, we introduce a representation system that helps define quality indicators and calculate their values in a coherent manner based on the data in medical databases. The representation system primarily consists of three parts. The first one is an ontology to define concepts related to medical services. The second one is a set of graphs that express the targets of quantification. The third one is a set of quantifying concepts that abstract quantities of the target concepts. The proposed representation system adequately divides the work for defining quality indicators and calculating their values from the data in medical databases, and, hence, it assists medical staffs and system engineers who manage medical databases to perform their own work and to collaborate on the evaluation and the comparison of medical services.