Benefits of data quality

The benefits of using routine health care data for planning, policy making, and research are well established. Developments are underway to use this same data to build better and safer care through decision support systems and artificial intelligence. However, using data to augment direct care requires that data is high quality: timely, complete and accurately coded. This document provides recommendations for providers to help build high quality data with benefits for patients, clinicians and the organisation.

There are many direct benefits for patients in improving data quality. This data will ensure easier surveillance of patient safety, allow clinicians to use data confidently to drive local quality improvement initiatives and support new technology for direct care including artificial intelligence.

Clinicians will be able to use decision support tools that leverage high quality data to ensure more timely and accurate diagnosis, thereby allowing early intervention before deterioration, with lifesaving results.

With high quality data, organisations can create reliable insights about the potential traffic in care sites and predict workforce needs ahead of time. In addition, research by the American research organisation KLAS has shown that expert interaction with electronic healthcare record systems results in better retention of clinicians.