Data quality and completeness are critical to the success of any health information system, we therefore strive to ensure that members of the Health Care Database update their profiles at least once every year to cater for changes in data such as contacts or physical address information.

We are aware that most of the data integrity problems occur at the point of entry/upload, we are therefore making use of auto populating fields and drop down menus to reduce the probablilty of duplicate records and other data entry related issues.

We also use data validation rules to ensure data integrity by controlling and restricting the values that users can enter into the system. By protecting information from accidental alteration, these validation rules provide additional security and data quality assurance.

Its important that staff members with access to the Healh Care Database are properly trained on data entry and upload protocols. There are several steps we consider when training:

• We make training an active, evolving process in response to operational needs.
• We ensure that an easy-to-understand document with procedures should be readily available for reference.
• All system administrators and users are assigned correct levels of access based on their training and role.
• Auditing processes are put into place so that individuals can be held accountable for any inaccurate data entered into the Health Care Database.

Audit trails are also an important part of our data integrity checks, an audit trail is an inerasable record of all data in a system, including any changes that have been made to a database or file. The audit trail help us to answer: Who? What? When? And Why?