Improving Data Quality of Health Information Systems: A Holistic Design- Oriented Approach

Structural changes and increasing market dynamics in the healthcare sector intensify the health providers’ need for cost-savings and process optimisation. To address actual drawbacks the adoption of eHealth is currently seen as opportunity to improve not only effectiveness and efficiency but also quality of health services. Data quality aspects will therefore gain in importance. As the actual use of the data is outside of the systems designers’ control and in contrast to empiricaland practitionerbased research approaches it is the goal of this contribution to present a first design-oriented approach that helps systems designers to understand the reality of the different stakeholders of healthcare. For this purpose a conceptual model with 44 design elements is presented. For the analysis of the domain two different perspectives are identified. An inter-organisational view defines all elements needed to depict the boundaries of healthcare organisations in order to enable exchange, sharing and integration of data, while the intra-organisational view helps to analyse the inner organisational reality. As not only technical but mainly interand intra-organisational issues are actually restricting data exchange, the proposed conceptual model provides a holistic framework for the improvement of data quality which is the prerequisite of high quality health services.