Importance of structured data in health care

Abstract

Today's digital world creates opportunities for the rapid development of medical diagnostics, therapy and research. From the point of view of university-level research challenges, digital storage and appropriate collection and processing of data is perhaps innovatively one of the most important. However, structured, accessible and transparent data storage in most of the Hungarian and foreign institutes has not yet been solved.

Our aim, is to confirm, based on previous studies, the increasing demand for the use of modern digital tools, electronic workflow and appropriate data processing in the medical sector. Furthermore, based on surveys of anamnestic and diagnostic trends, we highlight the importance to include medical data in a structured retrieval system in order to achieve more efficient patient care and research work.

A literature search for systematic reviews was conducted on Pubmed/Medline database, by using several MeSH terms and free text words. After confirming that using structured data collection and assessment could be a promising technique to develop medical diagnoses, therapy and research processes, we present our own structured evaluation template.

Although research focuses mainly on the difference between paper and electronic data, in the most recent literature we can already find a study whose results show convincing evidence that structured and standardized data recording improves the quality of medical records. Based on our previous research results, we managed our own structured database for a reasonable storage of the large amount of patient material.

The use of electronic information systems facilitates the documentation activities of healthcare professionals. The quality of the electronic data itself is particularly important in patients care, but the Electronic Health Records (EHR) also provides essential information for quality assurance.

Structured and standardized documentation method influences positively the quality of the findings, creating an opportunity to reuse data whenever it is necessary, but its introduction is expected to impose increased administrative burdens on healthcare workers.