Data Quality Improvement Efforts in the Biosense Community

BACKGROUND: The BioSense 2.0 application is widely used by jurisdictions within the United States to house syndromic surveillance data and provide analytic tools to detect aberrations and visualize trends for pre-defined syndromes.  Jurisdictions vary in their level of engagement with facilities submitting these data, their ability to validate the quality of the data, and the methods used to submit these data to BioSense.  This variability leads to differences in the content and quality of the data housed in the BioSense application, which impacts the public health practitioner’s ability to meaningfully use these data for public health surveillance.

METHODS: In May 2014 the BioSense Governance Group (BGG) formed a workgroup to identify and address data quality concerns within the BioSense user community. To this end, the workgroup has collaborated with all essential BioSense stakeholders (including CDC, ISDS, ASTHO, and vendors) to produce resource and guidance documents, programming scripts, and recommendations for further improvements to the system.

RESULTS: Workgroup products thus far include:

1. Identification of key metrics for data quality monitoring
2. Documentation associating HL7 segments to corresponding BioSense locker fields
3. Script for aggregating records into visit-level data, while retaining important record-level metadata
4. Compilation of programming scripts (R, MySQL, and SAS) for various onboarding and data quality tasks
5. Recommendations for assigning data quality and processing responsibilities between facilities and/or HIEs providing data, public health agencies, and the CDC

CONCLUSIONS: The workgroup has made progress toward elucidating data quality and process concerns, identifying and assessing data quality metrics, improving the utility of the syndromic surveillance data housed in the BioSense 2.0 application, and disseminating best practice guidelines to practitioners. By focusing the efforts of a small group of BioSense users with interest and experience in data quality issues, this workgroup developed tools, provided documentation and other feedback to CDC and application developers, and drafted recommendations for roles and responsibilities for adoption. These efforts have ultimately resulted in encouraging more widespread use and ownership of data in jurisdictions, and helping BioSense application developers to actively address the identified data issues and develop tools within the application to monitor data quality more seamlessly.