Granular Quality Reporting for Cervical Cytology Testing

Quality reporting for cervical cancer prevention is focused on patients with normal cervical cytology, and excludes patients with cytological abnormalities that may be at higher risk. The major obstacles for granular reporting are the complexity of surveillance guidelines and free-text data. We performed automated chart review to compare the cytology testing rates for patients with 'atypical squamous cells of undetermined significance' (ASCUS) cytology, with the rates for patients with normal cytology. We modeled the surveillance guidelines, and extracted information from free-text cytology reports, to perform this study on 28101 female patients. Our results show that patients with ASCUS cytology had significantly higher adherence rates (94.9%) than those for patients with normal cytology (90.4%). Overall our study indicates that the quality of care varies significantly between the high and average risk patients. Our study demonstrates the use of health information technology for higher granularity of reporting for cervical cytology testing.