Updated as of January 22, 2016
- The EMR Data Quality (DQ) score is a snapshot of how well data are being recorded in your EMR based on measures of completeness (smoking status complete) and concordance (EMR/SAR screening rate comparison). Because the indicator currently only includes 3 data elements, it may not reflect your team’s general approach to data quality in your EMR. Work continues to further refine the measures of EMR data quality even as efforts are underway to improve it. The EMR DQ measure is an attempt to operationalize a data quality framework described by Bowen and Lau.
- Your EMR DQ score may be low if the cancer screening data in your EMR does NOT match the CCO cancer screening data. This might be due to lab results not coming in a consistent or standard way, or due to variations in documenting cancers, hysterectomies etc. so these patients can be excluded.
- Your EMR DQ score might not represent what is happening across your whole team, if you were only able to get the CCO SAR and EMR cancer screening rates for a few doctors.
- Your EMR DQ score might actually not represent the quality of data in your EMR, if you do better or worse on other aspects of data quality/standardization in your EMR (e.g. using SNOMED coding for your patients with diabetes or COPD).
- Teams might think their EMR data quality is WAY better than their score shows. If this is the case, have a look at the data quality actions page for other ways of improving data quality. Also, try using the imperfect data quality impact calculator to determine if your data are good enough and whether to proceed with improving the quality of your data, or not.
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