Quality indicators and incentive programs for health care improvement

Clinical indicators are important tools for assessing the quality of healthcare in both hospitals and primary care. The development and application of these indicators is critical because it is used to gauge the performance of health care by identifying and prioritizing areas for improvement. While developing or applying indicators, often it is necessary to take into consideration stakeholders’ perspectives, health care aspects that are being measured, and the availability of evidence. However, with the advancement of health information technology and the emergence of new methods such as computational text mining is now allowing other complicated processes for data extraction to be automated. The International Society for Quality in Health Care (ISQua) official journal the International Journal for Quality in Health Care (IJQHC), presents an interesting editor's choice paper by Coiera et al. [1] that studied the relationship of quality indicators to clinical trials. It is a thought-provoking study as it introduces the utilization of a new innovative method to measure the care indicators that maps to outcome measures in clinical trials. Most of these identified indicators could be directly linked to the research evidence. The result of this study indicates that computational tools can aid or even replace manual work to corroborate the potentially viable indicators or measures leading to increased efficiency or accuracy, keeping up with the current era of technology.