Data quality problems in administrative inpatient databases

Data quality has become increasingly important to many organizations. This is especially true in the health care field where cost pressures and the desire to improve patient care drive efforts to integrate and clean organizational data. Administrative data can contain inaccurate and unstable data, but they are readily available, relatively inexpensive and are widely used. This paper explores some issues regarding data quality, including a taxonomy for data quality problems, gives emphasis to administrative databases and presents some of the existing quality problems in this data using real examples. The study was based on a national in- and out-patient database with discharges between 2000 and 2007 from 96 hospitals in the Portuguese National Health Service.