Measuring the quality and completeness of medication-related information derived from hospital electronic health records database

Objective: Electronic Health Records (EHRs) database is a great source for pharmacoepidemiological research as thousands of patients’ clinical and medication information is stored in the database. However, the use of EHRs database for research purposes depends greatly on the accuracy and completeness of the data being used. This study mainly aimed to assess the completeness of EHRs patients’ medication-related information. Design: A retrospective cross-sectional study using data extracted from the EHRs database was conducted. Setting: The EHRs data was obtained from a single tertiary hospital in Saudi Arabia. Main outcome measure(s): The completeness of data was measured considering if a patients’ record contains all desired types of data (i.e., patients’ demographics, clinical diagnosis, and medication-related information). Results: A total of 23,411 unique individuals were identified after extracting the data from the EHRs. The study found that 89.9% of the patients had a complete data (i.e., age, gender, marital status, nationality, encounter type, and clinical diagnosis). Further, 83.1% of the patients had complete medication-related information. Subgroup analysis by the encounter type indicated that the data was 91.0% complete for outpatient encounter and 93.2% complete for inpatient encounter. Conclusion: The study findings indicate that the completeness of the data varies by the desired types of data. EHRs can be a potentially great resource to conduct research to assess medication use. Further studies focusing on the content and completeness of EHRs for a specific patient population and evaluate other dimensions of EHRs data quality are needed. Keywords: Electronic Health Records, Medication, Completeness, Secondary dat