REVIEW ARTICLE


A Review of Data Quality Assessment in Emergency Medical Services



Mehrnaz Mashoufi1, Haleh Ayatollahi2, *, Davoud Khorasani-Zavareh3, 4
1 PhD Student of Health Information Management, School of Health Management and Information Sciences, Tehran Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
2 School of Health Management and Information Sciences, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
3 Safety Promotion and Injury Prevention Research Center, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
4 Department of Health in Disaster and Emergency, School of HSE, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran


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© 2018 Mashoufi et al.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the School of Health Management and Information Sciences, Iran University of Medical Sciences, No.6, Vali-e-Asr St., Yasami St., Tehran, Iran; Tel: +982188794301; E-mail: ayatollahi.h@iums.ac.ir


Abstract

Introduction:

Data quality is an important issue in emergency medicine. The unique characteristics of emergency care services, such as high turn-over and the speed of work may increase the possibility of making errors in the related settings. Therefore, regular data quality assessment is necessary to avoid the consequences of low quality data. This study aimed to identify the main dimensions of data quality which had been assessed, the assessment approaches, and generally, the status of data quality in the emergency medical services.

Methods:

The review was conducted in 2016. Related articles were identified by searching databases, including Scopus, Science Direct, PubMed and Web of Science. All of the review and research papers related to data quality assessment in the emergency care services and published between 2000 and 2015 (n=34) were included in the study.

Results:

The findings showed that the five dimensions of data quality; namely, data completeness, accuracy, consistency, accessibility, and timeliness had been investigated in the field of emergency medical services. Regarding the assessment methods, quantitative research methods were used more than the qualitative or the mixed methods. Overall, the results of these studies showed that data completeness and data accuracy requires more attention to be improved.

Conclusion:

In the future studies, choosing a clear and a consistent definition of data quality is required. Moreover, the use of qualitative research methods or the mixed methods is suggested, as data users’ perspectives can provide a broader picture of the reasons for poor quality data.

Keywords: Data accuracy, Assessment, Emergency Medical Services, Medical Records, Health care, Hospital records.