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Abstract
Objectives There 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.
Setting Four tertiary hospitals in Beijing, China.
Participants Nineteen healthcare professionals with experience in using EHR data for clinical research participated in the study.
Methods A 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.
Results The 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.
Conclusions These results provide a basis to begin to address current barriers and ultimately to improve validity and generalisability of research findings in China.
- electronic health records
- data quality
- clinical research
- qualitative study
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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Footnotes
Contributors KN and HC conducted the interviews and analysis and writing of the manuscript. YZ designed the research project. LZ and NL made critical revisions to the paper. All authors reviewed and gave final approval of the version to be submitted.
Funding This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no.81701067).
Disclaimer The funders had no role in the study design, data collection, analysis and decision to publish.
Competing interests None declared.
Ethics approval The study was approved by the Ethics committee of Peking University Third hospital (No. M2018095).
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data sharing statement Study protocol and original data are available on request by emailing the corresponding author.
Patient consent for publication Not required.