US Patent 7849062 Identifying and using critical fields in quality management

Methods and systems for identifying critical fields in documents, for example so that quality improvement efforts can be prioritized on the critical fields. One aspect of the invention concerns a method for improving quality of a data processing operation in a plurality of documents. A set of documents is sampled. An error rate for fields in the documents is estimated based on the sampling. Critical fields are identified based on which fields have error rates higher than a threshold.