Ontology- and Model-Based Quality Indicators Designing Framework

Though quality indicators play an important role in assessment of medical service quality of hospitals, there still exists no universal framework to collect or select adequate quality indicators for certain assessment of medical service quality. This paper provides a set of models called "Medical Service Assessment Models (MSAM)" that help collect adequate quality indicators to assess medical service quality from the patients’ viewpoint. To this end, we focus on a set of semantic patterns of medical service quality assessment and develop an ontology called "Medical Service Assessment Ontology (MSAO)", which is a vocabulary to construct MSAM based on the patterns. The framework consisting of MSAM and MSAO plays a role in guidelines for collecting adequate quality indicators to assess medial service quality from the patients' viewpoint, and helps explain the basis for the collection of quality indicators. Keywords-quality indicator; medical service assessment;