What is Data Quality in Healthcare?

Data quality in healthcare is vital to administrative, patient care, and records management processes. Where you get your healthcare data, as well as how you filter, organize, and update it, will all factor into your organization's success.

What Is Data Quality and Why Is It Important?

Healthcare data encompasses all information gathered pertaining to a patient, their care, and their healthcare coverage. Data collection in a healthcare setting typically begins with personally identifying information (PII). Most healthcare systems use a combination of physical files and digital databases to gather this information.

Healthcare data can include but is not limited to:

• Personally Identifying Information (PII)
• Medical, family, and work environment history
• Preexisting conditions and past hospitalizations
• Past and current medications and supplements 
• Allergies and sensitivities
• Insurance coverages and billing information
• Associated healthcare providers
• Other persons authorized to access patient data

Without accurate healthcare data, patient services suffer. Data comes from many different sources, including patients, family members, other healthcare providers, and third-party databases. Healthcare organizations must practice diligence to ensure data quality control. 

What Is Good Data Quality?

Good data quality in healthcare means that you can find information relating to a patient quickly and easily. Identifying vital information before gathering data ensures relevance and minimizes unnecessary data storage that takes up valuable space.

Excellence in patient care and associated services depends on high-quality data. Healthcare data must also be accurate and contain no duplications or errors. Review incoming data thoroughly to ensure accuracy and prevent duplicate records.

Finally, you must keep the data consistent. Finding critical records quickly can mean saving lives. Format incoming information according to a logical system, making every piece of data correlate with the correct database field.

What Is Data Quality Management?

Data quality analysts were the original gatekeepers for data quality and management. Today's intelligent data quality management systems can source, clean, filter, and organize data to create a searchable database. 

Quality-controlled data makes it easy for anyone with database authorization to search for, locate, and retrieve data at any time. Enforce data quality control at each point of data entry to maintain data integrity.

What Is High-Quality Data Doing for Your Organization?

What is data quality capable of bringing to the table? When integrated into a business intelligence (BI) solution, high-quality healthcare data leads to better patient experiences. Improving data quality means enhancing patient outcomes, minimizing redundancies, and reducing the risk of medical errors.    

Consolidating healthcare data analytics in a single business intelligence solution provides almost unlimited potential for organizational improvement. Leveraging demographics data to drive more effective healthcare marketing empowers providers to take ownership of medical data to improve patient care.

Patients with personalized access to protected databases can remain informed about test results and doctor recommendations. Research teams can connect remotely using anonymized data to inform new protocols. Improving the relationship between patient and provider becomes possible only with relevant, accurate, and consistent data.

At Syntrix, we specialize in healthcare data analytics solutions to simplify and streamline every step of the data collection and management process. Contact us today to discuss your healthcare data needs.