Rules based data quality assessment on claims database

Data quality problems in coded clinical and administrative data have persisted ever since diagnoses and procedures were first coded and used for healthcare billing. These data are used in clinical decision-making introducing a route for iatrogenesis. As we share data on regional Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) and include them in electronic health records the potential for harm may be increased. To study this problem we applied rules-based data quality checks that have been previously tested on Electronic Health Records (EHR) data on a limited set of aggregated claims data. Medicaid claims data was used exclusively. CMS has clear guidelines for claims submitted for Medicaid patients and penalties are incurred for erroneous claims, which should ensure a high quality data source, however reports of low and varying sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive value of coded diagnoses are common. To identify data quality defects in claims data in a state All Payer Claims Dataset (APCD) we applied and evaluated a recently developed rules-based data quality assessment and monitoring system for Electronic Health Record (EHR) data to test effectiveness in claims data. These rules, that are feasible for 'All Payer Claims data' and Medicaid data are identified, applied and the Data Quality issue results are produced.