HOME Q-Score: Assessing the quality of healthcare provisioning

With the continuous rise in health care costs globally, there is growing interest in investigating new, innovative ways to improve the quality of healthcare provision. Healthcare providers are being held accountable for the 'quality' of healthcare outcomes, thus triggering a need to audit and evaluate the quality of healthcare provided. This paper presents a technology to monitor and assess the quality of healthcare provision, with the inherent capability of indicating its impact on patients' health. The healthcare quality assessment is designed to identify within an episode 'what went wrong' and, if it did, where the error occurred. The process could be used, for example, to indicate if a patient's health deteriorated due to an inaccurate diagnosis or an inappropriate treatment. This paper positions our healthcare research, presenting the concept of how to monitor the quality of healthcare provision - using an outcome-centric approach via a mechanism called HOME Q-Score (Healthcare Outcomes Monitoring sErvice Quality Score).