Clinician perspectives on the quality of patient data used for clinical decision support: a qualitative study.

Clinical decision support (CDS), defined broadly as patient-specific information and knowledge provided at the point of care, depends on a foundation of high quality electronic patient data. Little is known about how clinicians perceive the quality and value of data used to support CDS within an electronic health record (EHR) environment. During a three-year research study, we collected ethnographic data from ten diverse organizations, including community hospitals, academic medical centers and ambulatory clinics. An in-depth analysis of the theme "data as a foundation for CDS" yielded a descriptive framework incorporating five subthemes related to data quality: completeness, accessibility, context specificity, accuracy, and reliability. We identified several multi-dimensional models that might be used to conceptualize data quality characteristics for future research. These results could provide new insights to system designers and implementers on the importance clinicians place on specific data quality characteristics regarding electronic patient data for CDS.