Health Record Hiccups

Information relating to day-to-day care in hospitals is increasingly being recorded electronically, and once this data has been appropriately anonymised, it can become a highly valuable resource for medical research.

However, the transition from data being typed into a computer by a health worker, to a data set that is suitable for a research study, is not nearly as straightforward or consistent as people might assume. Firstly, there are many steps along the way which are not visible to end-users, where errors may potentially creep in. Secondly, hospital processes and machinery can and do change over time, which can lead to changes in the way data is recorded, even if there is no change in the patients who are coming in.

The goal of this project is to try to improve our understanding of how often these types of changes occur in real working hospitals, and how best to assist researchers who might be using this data, to identify these types of changes so that they can deal with them appropriately in their studies.