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Medical Quality Assessment by Scoring Adherence to Guideline Intentions

Affiliations of the authors: Stanford Medical Informatics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California, USA (AA, YS, MAM), Department of Information Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel (YS).

Abstract

Quality assessment of clinician actions and patient outcomes is a central problem in guideline- or standards-based medical care. In this paper we describe an approach for evaluating and consistently scoring clinician adherence to medical guidelines using the intentions of guideline authors. We present the Quality Indicator Language (QUIL) that may be used to formally specify quality constraints on physician behavior and patient outcomes derived from medical guidelines. We present a modeling and scoring methodology for consistently evaluating multi-step and multi-choice guideline plans based on guideline intentions and their revisions.