title: The reproducibility of CLIF, a method for clinical quality indicator formalisation.
abstract: In order to be able to automatically calculate clinical quality indicators, we have proposed CLIF, a stepwise method for clinical quality indicator formalisation. Quality indicators are used for external accountability and hospital comparison. As clinical quality indicators are computed in a decentralised manner by the hospitals themselves, reproducibility of the formalisation method is essential to ensure the comparability of calculated values. Thus, we performed a case study to investigate the reproducibility of CLIF. Eight participants formalised the same sample quality indicator with the help of a web-based indicator-authoring tool that facilitates the application of CLIF. We analysed the results per step and concluded that the method itself leads to reproducible results. To further improve reproducibility, ambiguities in the indicator text must be clarified and trained experts are needed to encode clinical concepts and to specify the relations between concepts.
authors.affiliation: Dept. of Medical Informatics, Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. k.dentler@amc.uva.nl
authors.forename: Kathrin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Dentler
authors.forename: Ronald
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Cornet
authors.forename: Annette
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ten Teije
authors.forename: Kristien
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Tytgat
authors.forename: Jean
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Klinkenbujl
authors.forename: Nicolette
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: De Keizer
mesh_terms: D020407:Internet; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards*; D019984:Quality Indicators, Health Care / Q000592:standards*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D014584:User-Computer Interface