scholarly journals Factors influencing the quality of vital sign data in electronic health records: A qualitative study

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 1276-1286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean E Stevenson ◽  
Johan Israelsson ◽  
Goran Petersson ◽  
Peter A Bath
BMJ Open ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. e029314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaiwen Ni ◽  
Hongling Chu ◽  
Lin Zeng ◽  
Nan Li ◽  
Yiming Zhao

ObjectivesThere is an increasing trend in the use of electronic health records (EHRs) for clinical research. However, more knowledge is needed on how to assure and improve data quality. This study aimed to explore healthcare professionals’ experiences and perceptions of barriers and facilitators of data quality of EHR-based studies in the Chinese context.SettingFour tertiary hospitals in Beijing, China.ParticipantsNineteen healthcare professionals with experience in using EHR data for clinical research participated in the study.MethodsA qualitative study based on face-to-face semistructured interviews was conducted from March to July 2018. The interviews were audiorecorded and transcribed verbatim. Data analysis was performed using the inductive thematic analysis approach.ResultsThe main themes included factors related to healthcare systems, clinical documentation, EHR systems and researchers. The perceived barriers to data quality included heavy workload, staff rotations, lack of detailed information for specific research, variations in terminology, limited retrieval capabilities, large amounts of unstructured data, challenges with patient identification and matching, problems with data extraction and unfamiliar with data quality assessment. To improve data quality, suggestions from participants included: better staff training, providing monetary incentives, performing daily data verification, improving software functionality and coding structures as well as enhancing multidisciplinary cooperation.ConclusionsThese results provide a basis to begin to address current barriers and ultimately to improve validity and generalisability of research findings in China.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (11) ◽  
pp. 1379-1384 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J Cimino

Abstract Complaints about electronic health records, including information overload, note bloat, and alert fatigue, are frequent topics of discussion. Despite substantial effort by researchers and industry, complaints continue noting serious adverse effects on patient safety and clinician quality of life. I believe solutions are possible if we can add information to the record that explains the “why” of a patient’s care, such as relationships between symptoms, physical findings, diagnostic results, differential diagnoses, therapeutic plans, and goals. While this information may be present in clinical notes, I propose that we modify electronic health records to support explicit representation of this information using formal structure and controlled vocabularies. Such information could foster development of more situation-aware tools for data retrieval and synthesis. Informatics research is needed to understand what should be represented, how to capture it, and how to benefit those providing the information so that their workload is reduced.


2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Chun Moon ◽  
Rebecca Hills ◽  
George Demiris

BackgroundLittle is known about optimisation of electronic health records (EHRs) systems in the hospital setting while adoption of EHR systems continues in the United States.ObjectiveTo understand optimisation processes of EHR systems undertaken in leading healthcare organisations in the United States.MethodsInformed by a grounded theory approach, a qualitative study was undertaken that involved 11 in-depth interviews and a focus group with the EHR experts from the high performing healthcare organisations across the United States.ResultsThe study describes EHR optimisation processes characterised by prioritising exponentially increasing requests with predominant focus on improving efficiency of EHR, building optimisation teams or advisory groups and standardisation. The study discusses 16 types of optimisation that interdependently produced 16 results along with identifying 11 barriers and 20 facilitators to optimisation.ConclusionsThe study describes overall experiences of optimising EHRs in select high performing healthcare organisations in the US. The findings highlight the importance of optimising the EHR after, and even before, go-live and dedicating resources exclusively for optimisation.


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