Measuring and Improving the Quality of Data Used for Syndromic Surveillance

Introduction Nearly all of the myriad activities (or use cases) in clinical and public health (e.g., patient care, surveillance, community health assessment, policy) involve generating, collecting, storing, analyzing, or sharing data about individual patients or populations. Effective clinical and public health practice in the twenty-first century requires access to data from an increasing array of information systems, including but not limited to electronic health records. However, the quality of data in electronic health record systems can be poor or “unfit for use.” Therefore measuring and monitoring data quality is an essential activity for clinical and public health professionals as well as researchers.