Data quality challenges: A content analysis in the e-health domain

Abstract

E-health (electronic health) has become a global term and is referred to in literature as a conversion to electronic health records, benefiting from internet use and health agreements in order to develop sufficient communication between healthcare professionals. Substandard data quality could impact quality of care in health facilities, lead to privacy and security issues, increase cost, create risks and decrease the benefits from using health information systems. The quality of data is essential, not only for use in patient care, but also for monitoring the performance of the health service and employees. Data collected and presented should be accurate, complete, reliable, comprehensible and accessible to data users. The purpose of the paper is to explore data quality challenges giving rise to substandard data quality in electronic health records. The challenges identified from literature can provide a reference for future health data quality interventions. To realise the purpose of this paper, an inductive content analysis methodology was followed.