An exploration of data qulity awareness and impacts in healthcare

Abstract

This study explores the effects of specific types of data quality education on the awareness that employees have of data quality in healthcare electronic health records (EHRs), and the relationship between that behaviour and the resulting outcomes (actual data quality). This study explores conceptual and contextual data quality education and proposes that contextual data quality education is more effective than conceptual data quality education. While this proposition is supported by literature, there is little empirical evidence. The study utilises a mixed-methods approach consisting of conceptual and contextual data quality education, perception surveys and live data snapshots taken from an EHR in a busy tertiary maternity hospital. Through this study, we found that providing data quality education to employees surrounding the eight dimensions of data quality, improves data quality awareness, as participants with a non-technical background were able to make a meaningful connection between data quality dimensions and data use. When presented with conceptual and contextual data quality education, we found that participants made the strongest and most powerful connection with the contextual data quality education. We found that data quality assessment tools create data quality awareness for technical employees by assisting them in proactively finding data quality issues. This study's results have generated a conceptual model for generating data quality awareness and proposing a change to the traditional data quality feedback loop that incorporates education and assessment tools.