Electronic Health Record Data Quality and Performance Assessments: Scoping Review

Abstract

Background: Electronic health records (EHRs) have an enormous potential to advance medical research and practice through easily accessible and interpretable EHR-derived databases. Attainability of this potential is limited by issues with data quality (DQ) and performance assessment.

Objective: This review aims to streamline the current best practices on EHR DQ and performance assessments as a replicable standard for researchers in the field.

Methods: PubMed was systematically searched for original research articles assessing EHR DQ and performance from inception until May 7, 2023.

Results: Our search yielded 26 original research articles. Most articles had 1 or more significant limitations, including incomplete or inconsistent reporting (n=6, 30%), poor replicability (n=5, 25%), and limited generalizability of results (n=5, 25%). Completeness (n=21, 81%), conformance (n=18, 69%), and plausibility (n=16, 62%) were the most cited indicators of DQ, while correctness or accuracy (n=14, 54%) was most cited for data performance, with context-specific supplementation by recency (n=7, 27%), fairness (n=6, 23%), stability (n=4, 15%), and shareability (n=2, 8%) assessments. Artificial intelligence-based techniques, including natural language data extraction, data imputation, and fairness algorithms, were demonstrated to play a rising role in improving both dataset quality and performance.

Conclusions: This review highlights the need for incentivizing DQ and performance assessments and their standardization. The results suggest the usefulness of artificial intelligence-based techniques for enhancing DQ and performance to unlock the full potential of EHRs to improve medical research and practice.

Keywords: EHR; clinical informatics; data performance; data quality; data science; electronic health record; performance; record; review methodology; review methods; scoping; search; synthesis.