Clinical Data Quality and Validation

Definition

Clinical data quality is defined as the accuracy and completeness of the clinical data for the purposes of clinical care, health services and other secondary uses such as decision support and clinical research. The quality of clinical data can be achieved by the standardization, inspection and evaluation of the data generating processes and tools [2].

Key Points

The term data quality can potentially have different meanings or interpretation based on the domain or the application using the data [1]. Even within the context of clinical databases, there exists a multitude of different data types (administrative data, procedure data, laboratory data and so on) that may be used for several different applications such as clinical report generation, billing or research. The major components of clinical data quality can be broadly characterized as follows:

Accuracy

Clinical data are often generated by automated systems (such as lab equipment) or manually entered by clinicians...