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Volume 12 Issue 1
February 2009
The Patient Data Analysis Information System: Addressing Data and Information Quality Issues
David Sammon¹, Kieran A. O’Connor² and John Leo¹
¹ University College, Cork, Ireland
² Victoria University Hospital, Cork, Ireland
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This paper reports on the development of a local practice-based repository of clinical patient data. The Patient Data Analysis Information System (PDA-IS) provides functionality to a Consultant Physician in Geriatric Medicine in terms of storing and analysing high quality clinical patient data for the purposes of more informed and accurate decision making. This paper also reports on an initial end-user evaluation of the PDA-IS and identifies the benefits that were realised by the Consultant Physician. In the IS area, practitioners are well aware of the observation that an Information System is only ever as good as the store of data. However, it is also the fact that the use of incorrect data structures for storing data can significantly hamper its retrieval and analysis. The lack of a normalised data structure for instance can lead to data inconsistencies and redundancies that prevent associations and patterns in the data being identified during analysis. For a number of years the Consultant Physician collected his patient data and logged his clinical observations in self-designed Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. This translated into the existence of at least five (heterogeneous) spreadsheets being maintained on an on-going basis, which reflected a fragmented approach to data capture and resulted in the existence of information silos. Therefore, the Consultant Physician’s patient data was not defined in a uniform and standardised way and this poor categorisation of data resulted in the cumbersome production of low-value information; furthermore, data collection was primarily hospital-centric as opposed to patient-centric and curtailed the ability of the Consultant Physician to view a patient’s history across his service. Indeed, despite the non-value-added nature of generating a patient history from the collection of Excel spreadsheets, there was also the issue of data integrity and the Consultant Physician’s low level of trust in the accuracy of the information.
Keywords:
geriatric medicine, patient-centric data, data integrity, relational data model, n-tier architecture, evaluation
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