An ontology for healthcare quality indicators: challenges for semantic interoperability.

Semantic interoperability, a popular research area for electronic health records, can also be a challenge for quality indicators. We analysed attributes and relationships in a diverse set of over 200 healthcare quality indicators and created a searchable ontology. The ontology is intended to help reduce duplication of effort in healthcare quality monitoring. We describe issues with coding the indicators and specifying inclusion and exclusion criteria and propose some solutions.