Improving Data Quality in Health Care

Abstract

The increasingly information intensive nature of health care demands a proactive and strategic approach to data quality to ensure the right information is available to the right person at the right time in the right format. The approach must also encompass the rights of the patient to have their health data protected and used in an ethical way. This article describes the principles to establish good practice and overcome practical barriers that define and control data quality in health data collections and the mechanisms and frameworks that can be developed to achieve and sustain quality. The experience of a national health data quality project in New Zealand is used to illustrate the issues.