Finally, the levels of completeness of data fields likely vary in different settings such as the public and private sector, and within and between countries, so our findings may not generalise to other contexts.
Incoming data are routinely monitored for completeness of data fields and consistency with the number of records routinely received from each data sources, and problems are corrected by working with the applicable data source; however, such checks can identify only large-scale problems and more detailed checking for data accuracy is beyond current capabilities.
Areas of inconsistency were due to differences in underlying population demographics and cardiovascular risks and completeness of certain data fields.
The NLCA estimates 98% case ascertainment since 2009 and completeness of individual data fields improves year on year (NHS Information Centre, 2012).
While the site practice groups varied in completeness of various data fields, the two source EMR systems were comparable in the fields available and used for analysis.
The availability of data varies across EMRs and depends on their design and completeness of data entry into applicable fields. 1 Because EMRs are designed primarily for patient care or billing, details that are important for health research (eg, tumor classification, unrelated comorbidities) may not be collected as rigorously as required for such research.
We checked the completeness of data entry of critical fields of notification form, including name, sex, birthday, address, reporting health care facilities, medical chart number, name of reporting doctor, date of diagnosis, site of disease (pulmonary and/or extrapulmonary) and smear examinations.
In other fields the completeness of data entry, as recorded in 2008, was generally over 80% (table 1) and has been rising since MINAP's inception.
Notifiable disease surveillance systems in Australia have consistently reported high levels of completeness for the demographic data fields of age and sex, but low levels of completeness for Aboriginality data.
Calendar landmarking instruments have been widely used across many research fields to increase the reliability of dating, and to improve consistency and completeness of data [ 6].
The dynamic reports track the overall progress of studies including patient accrual and eligibility; completeness of data; timeliness of data acquisition; compliance with protocol procedure and completeness of follow-up.
