Reference: Henry, S. B.; Lenert, L.; Middleton, B.; & Partridge, R. Linking Process and Outcome with an Integrated Clinical Information System. Knowledge Systems Laboratory, February, 1993.
Abstract: The rapidly changing health care environment characterized by escalating health care casts, high acuity of hospitalized patients, and demands for information about quality of care from consumers, third party payers, accreditation organizations and state and federal governments, has emphasized the need for effective strategies to assess and improve the quality of health care services. We believe that an integrated clinical information system is an essential component of a broad-based approach for quality assessment and improvement. In this panel, we first review quality assessment from a historical perspective. We next review two major building blocks for systems that support quality assessment and improvement: 1) controlled health care vocabularies to describe patient problems/characteristics, interventions, and outcomes, and analytical tools to describe and to link process and outcomes. Lastly, we describe the Quality Integration Cycle and we specify the role of the clinical information management system in the cycle.