Role of Information Technology in Healthcare Quality Assessment

Quantifying and improving the quality of health care is an increasingly important goal in medicine. Because quality of life is difficult to define and even more difficult to measure - particularly with physically and mentally vulnerable people - outcomes from nursing in continuing care are not easily articulated. The focus of the nursing assessment tool is therefore on increasing quality of life, rather than perceiving health gain simply as increased longevity. Assessment is considered to be the first step in the process of individualized nursing care. It provides information that is critical to the development of a plan of action that enhances personal health status. It also decreases the potential for, or the severity of, chronic conditions and helps the individual to gain control over their health through self-care. In this chapter the authors try to describe how important is the role of information and especially of the Information Technology in healthcare quality assessment.

The Application of Natural-language Processing to Healthcare Quality Assessment

This paper describes the automatic extraction of information from hospital discharge letters. The computer analysis and extraction process, designed to eliminate much of the manual effort required to review patient documents, are presented.