Data cleansing

When standardizing, sharing and analyzing data in healthcare, there is a problem that is often overlooked and certainly underestimated; the databases are highly polluted.

In recent years, more and more organisations in the healthcare sector have started to store patient data in integrated information systems; sometimes from paper records, sometimes from all kinds of lists in Word and Excel or outdated stand-alone systems. As a result of numerous mergers and takeovers, organisations also have to bring these systems back into line, a situation has arisen in which a lot of data is in the systems twice, or even several times, or is not entered unambiguously, or is in different places (fields) in the database

Whether it concerns projects in which the systems are modernised, brought to the cloud or standardised, or steps are taken to share the data digitally within and between organisations, cleaning up all this data is essential for the success of the projects. It goes without saying that projects that analyse health data also benefit greatly from cleaned-up sets of data. Patients do not immediately notice this, but will be satisfied in the long run (1). In the long run, employees in particular will benefit greatly from these cleaned-up databases (3).