Quality of Care Metric Reporting from Clinical Narratives: Assessing Ontology Components

The Institute of Medicine reports a growing demand in recent years for quality improvement within the healthcare industry. In response, numerous organizations have been involved in the development and reporting of quality measurement metrics. However, disparate data models from such organizations shift the burden of accurate and reliable metrics extraction and reporting to healthcare providers. Furthermore, manual abstraction of quality metrics and diverse implementation of Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems deepens the complexity of consistent, valid, explicit, and comparable quality measurement reporting within healthcare provider organizations. The main objective of this research is to evaluate an ontology-based information extraction framework to utilize unstructured clinical text for extraction and reporting quality of care metrics that are interpretable and comparable across healthcare institutions. Keywords—ontology; information extraction; quality of care metric; clinical narratives