New Study Questions Quality Of US Health Data

A research team conducted a study on the quality of health data in the United States. The study evaluated clinical registries that were maintained by the health care sector. To measure the performance of the health care industry, the researchers created a registry of registries.

The study revealed that the method used to maintain most of the registries were unscientific and inaccurate. They found that there was an urgent need to improve the manner by which clinical data was recorded and reported.

The press release revealed that modern health care faces the greatest hurdle with inaccurate information. According to Prof. Marty Makary, M.D., M.P.H, inaccurate information undermines the ability to understand diseases and evaluate treatments. It also makes the health care industry value driven.

This has had an adverse bearing on the national efforts to improve the health care industry. These registries help in formulating health care policies and to evaluate the performance of hospitals and physicians. They also help in the study of diseases and give patients the best choice of treatment.

The study assessed health service and disease outcome data and found that the information contained in the registry had more than 160,000 patients. These patients were treated in 1,600 hospitals across the United States. It was found that there were differences in the unadjusted data which according to the researchers could be misleading and should be used with great caution as this could affect scientific research and human lives.

It was seen that though one quarter of the registries were funded by taxpayers, only three were shared publicly and some of them did not even maintain a clinical registry. The researchers state that this is the main cause for discrepancies in data collection and accurate evaluation.

Co-author of the study, Dr. Michol Cooper, M.D., Ph.D., at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said that a well-maintained clinical registry can give doctors real time vital information on what medications work well and which are harming patients. He added that the infrastructure to achieve this is vastly under-supported and a rigorous standard should be applied to the way a patient’s outcome data is reported.

Lead author Heather Lyu from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine stated that to get serious about measuring and improving performance, a criteria has to be developed that will help others run successful registries.

The study was published in the Journal for Healthcare Quality.

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