A Framework for User-Configurable Data Quality Assurance of Electronic Patient Records

Abstract

Electronic Patient Records (EPRs) are valuable data resources for clinical and operational research. The heterogeneity of medical software coupled with the changing data formats and long lifespan of the patient datasets stored in EPRs results in data inconsistencies that hinder operational activities and increase personnel efforts for data lookup and cleaning. This study presents an approach for automated data quality reporting that was developed and tested within a real-world hospital setting at Royal Surrey County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in 2020. 81 data quality tests configurable via spreadsheets were defined and executed to yield standardised human-readable reports in comma-separated value format. The data evaluation and reporting routines provided manyfold improvement over existing data quality reporting mechanisms.