Grupo Alarcos · Journal article · 2022
Multisource and temporal variability in Portuguese hospital administrative datasets: Data quality implications
Julio Souza, Ismael Caballero Muñoz-Reja, Joao Vasco Santos, Mariana Lobo, Andreia Pinto, João Viana, Carlos Sáez Silvestre, Fernando Lopes, Alberto Freitas
This paper described the successful application of a set of reproducible, generalizable and systematic methods for variability assessment, including visualization tools that can be useful for detecting abnormal patterns in healthcare data, also addressing some limitations of common approaches. The presented method for multisource variability assessment is based on SPC, which is an advantage considering the lack of gold standard for such process. Properly controlling for hospital characteristics and differences in case-mix for estimating SHR is critical for isolating data quality-related variability among data sources. The use of IGT plots provides an advantage over common methods for temporal variability assessment due its suitability for multitype and multimodal data, which are common characteristics of healthcare data. The novelty of this work is the use of a set of methods to discover new data quality insights in healthcare data.