Data Quality is Paramount in Healthcare

by | Oct 28, 2024 | Healthcare

Reading Time: 4 minutes

You can’t get actionable results from analytics without reliable data. This is true in any industry, but when it comes to healthcare, it could also mean the difference between life and death. Bad information can lead to bad results. Good information can save lives.

Sometimes the data comes from years of trustworthy medical records, and in other cases all that is available to researchers is less reliable sources. Here are a couple of examples of the impacts different kinds of data can have, and how analytics can be used to take advantage of reliable data to make a difference in people’s health.

Inaccurate records

Perhaps you’ve heard of blue zones—areas around the world where people tend to live longer, which some researchers attribute more to environmental factors than any particular healthy behaviors. The data involved in finding these zones is how many centenarians and supercentenarians (people 110 years old or older) there are in a geographic area.

The problem with that is at the turn of the 20th century there tended to be fewer birth certificates. Some of that is due to low literacy rates at the time, and in other cases there was just poor record keeping. One unpublished study calls into question the existence of blue zones.

The story illustrates how potentially unreliable data can stand in the way of medical research. It may be that there is something to learn from these areas, but researchers might have to wait some years until there are more accurate birth records that can provide more definitive data that can help reach conclusions.

 

 

New stroke recommendations

That’s the kind of research health organizations are doing all the time in order to make the best decisions for patients. The American Stroke Association recently published new recommendations aimed at preventing strokes. It’s the first update in ten years, and the research considered reliable, published data from the past decade.

Among the factors that could play a role in strokes are social determinants of health such as difficulty obtaining health care, exposure to racism, discrimination, and stress, and limited access to healthy food. The report also mentions pregnancy and the postpartum period after childbirth as times when the risk of stroke is about triple that of nonpregnant adults of the same age. This research and report now provide the guidelines for doctors and how they care for patients in terms of looking for possible stroke symptoms.

 

 

Using an analytics solution

Once you have that kind of reliable data, you need an analytics solution that can help you make sense of it all. In fact, the solution can play a role in helping to make that data reliable. Often healthcare data is coming from a variety of sources. The best solutions can take data from disparate systems and bring it together to create one version of the truth so that everyone can rely on trustworthy data, knowing it is the same information being used across an enterprise.

The information can be used in so many ways, all of which benefit patients. It might be population health information, similar to the two instances mentioned above, where the data can provide insight into opportunities to improve patient care, or even access to care, possible preventative strategies, or used to measure the impact of interventions. The data could be used to help a healthcare organization operate more efficiently, whether that’s in terms of spending or even scheduling. Healthcare costs are complicated, but analytics solutions can provide reports that inform decisions around supplies or fees and make sure healthcare organizations are financially stable. Many hospitals also use data to try to address issues like burnout among medical professionals by trying to balance workloads or make certain parts of physicians’ jobs easier by providing more information at their fingertips.

All medical research has to start with an inquiry – usually along the lines of, “How can people lead healthier lives?” The initial data-gathering could take years, but the important work starts with that first question and first attempts to get information. Then it’s a matter of taking that information and trying to get results. That’s where you need the data to be reliable, and that’s where analytics can make a difference.

John Sucich
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