Assessment of Health Service Quality Through Electronic Health Record - A Scoping Review

The World Health Organization defines, that high quality health services should be effective, safe, people-centered, timely, equitable, integrated, and effective. This requires systematic quality assessment. The aim of this scoping review was to explore how electronic health records (EHRs) have been used to assess quality of health services using the WHO criteria. A total of 4247 records were obtained whereof 8 studies were included in the review. Research showed that EHRs were used to evaluate safety, performance and care processes. EHRs were regarded as an applicable real-world data source, highlighting the importance of consistency and standardised terminologies. Use of EHR data is limited to its representation of the real world and current evaluation systems have limited quality criteria, diverse definitions and they use only structured data. Future research should explore possibilities of natural language processing methods and include narrative EHR information for a more a comprehensive view of service quality assessment.