ICT for enabling the quality evaluation of health care services: A case study in a general hospital

Medical practice, monitoring and control guidelines enable standardization, assessment and quality improvementin healthcare. This often implies collecting and analyzing electronic medical records (EMRs)in order to calculate compliance metrics and support evidence-based decision-making. However, forthese benefits to materialize a set of challenges must be overcome, including the complexity requiredto represent guidelines in such a way that compliance can be automatically determined with the aid ofsoftware; the combination of both structured and unstructured (narrative text) data; and cultural orpolitical barriers. In this chapter, we present a strategy to overcome these challenges using three casestudies in chronic disease for a developing country. As such, this work contributes an approach to enablethe use of ICT-supported medical guideline evaluation, in order to contribute to a more reliableand context-dependent way of improving healthcare in developing countries in particular.