Clinical Data Quality Improvement
Our deep understanding of commercial healthcare IT services has convinced us of the ultimate importance of data quality processes for improving patient outcomes.
Our Data Quality solution is not an ‘it’ which we install, but rather a team of people we deploy virtually. The team includes a diverse range of skill sets to address the problems posed by incoming data. We supply the exact skill mix you need such as IT analysts, clinicians, data scientists, data quality analysts, and HL7 data standards experts such as CDA or FHIR analysts. Engage with our Data Quality (DQ) teams and they will identify data problems flowing into your EHR system and track down root causes to help eliminate missing, miscoded, and mispaced data which all pose risks to patient safety. Our virtual consultations give you access both to nationally known clinical data quality experts, Informatics experts, Nursing work flow experts, and international data standards experts.
EHR systems have many patient safety protocols in place, but if the clinical data is not coded properly, then the alerts may not be displayed, and no warnings are given. One example is that of drug-drug interaction alerts. Some operational quality improvement EHR systems even have their drug-drug checks 'temporarily' turned off, unbeknownst to the clinicians. This is not what your EHR vendor intended as this gives a false sense of security. Our quality improvement processes create better patient outcomes. Data quality is a critical foundation for your Clinical Decision Support system.
Your EHR system, such as Epic or Cerner, creates standard HL7 clinical documents known as CDA files. These files have varying standard formats such as Continuity of Care Documents (CCDs) and other types. We have special tools which parse and look inside the CDA files to see if the data is being sent out correctly. We can identify if data is missing, mis-coded or in the wrong place. Then we provide you with a report of our recommendations for improvement.
We meet with your staff to brief them on who should be in the meetings with our data quality team and decide how we access your data. Then once we receive your data, we kick off with an explanation of how we work and what we do. Next, we run our proprietary tools to create summaries of your most important domains (allergies, lab, etc.) for each of the CDA files which we receive. We provide a detailed report of six or more clinical domains to show you exactly where the problems are. Then you will know who to call and how to track down the source of the errors. The process repeats with the next set of files and domains.
Data quality problems can sometimes be traced back to improper set up of your EHR system. If your EHR system had prompted the user to enter RXNorm codes and NDF-RT codes were entered instead, then the critical drug - drug interaction checks will not execute properly. This is a critical risk and liability issue for all roles responsible for Risk and Data Quality. It is imperative that testing be done to ensure that this and all other patient safety protocols are working as the EHR vendor intended. We will work together with your vendor on such issues.