title: Application of An Ontology for Characterizing Data Quality For a Secondary Use of EHR Data.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The goal of this study is to apply an ontology based assessment process to electronic health record (EHR) data and determine its usefulness in characterizing data quality for calculating an example eMeasure (CMS178).
  
  
  METHODS
  The process uses a data quality ontology that references separate data quality, domain and task ontologies to compute measures based on proportions of constraints that are satisfied. These quantities indicate how well the data conforms to the domain and how well it fits the task.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The process was performed on a de-identified 200,000 encounter sample from a hospital EHR. CodingConsistency was poor (44%) but DomainConsistency (97%) and TaskRelevance (95%) were very good. Improvements in the data quality Measures correlated with improvements in the eMeasure.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This approach can encourage the development of new detailed Domain ontologies that can be reused for data quality purposes across different organizations' EHR data. Automating the data quality assessment process using this method can enable sharing of data quality metrics that may aid in making research results that use EHR data more transparent and reproducible.
authors.affiliation: University of Minnesota, Institute for Health Informatics.
authors.forename: Steven G
authors.initials: SG
authors.lastname: Johnson
authors.affiliation: University of Minnesota, Institute for Health Informatics.
authors.forename: Stuart
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Speedie
authors.affiliation: University of Minnesota, Institute for Health Informatics.
authors.forename: Gyorgy
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Simon
authors.affiliation: University of Minnesota , Department of Computer Science.
authors.forename: Vipin
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Kumar
authors.affiliation: University of Minnesota, Institute for Health Informatics; University of Minnesota, School of Nursing.
authors.forename: Bonnie L
authors.initials: BL
authors.lastname: Westra
mesh_terms: D000068598:Data Accuracy; D057286:Electronic Health Records / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006761:Hospitals; D006801:Humans; D008490:Medical Informatics / Q000379:methods*
keywords: Data quality; data validation and verification; electronic health record; ontology