An overview of electronic health information management systems quality assessment

Abstract

The efficient management and usage of information within integrated care delivery systems will have substantial impacts on patients' care outcomes. Electronic health information management systems need to guarantee the integrity of clinical data capture and the quality of information processing, in order to deliver actionable knowledge to health professionals at the point of care. Generic tools and evaluation frameworks are needed to assess the quality of eHealth information systems for a wide range of stakeholders: end-users, including health professionals and patients, healthcare organisations and policymakers. We present an overview of data and information quality assessment in electronic health systems. We use the model of the patient / clinician encounter of Brown and Warmington (2002) to describe how issues of poor data quality and information mismanagement impact on the clinical encounter. We then use the 6 dimensions model of quality in information systems first proposed by DeLone & McLean (1992) to propose a comprehensive description of data quality issues in eHealth.