What Is Data Integrity and Why Is It Important in Healthcare?

Healthcare organizations produce large volumes of data, on everything from patient admissions to insurance reimbursements. This data can be invaluable. It can show executives and decision-makers how to best allocate their organization’s resources to serve the needs of their communities and patients.

One of the most important steps in ensuring data integrity is providing clear attribution for all patient-centered data. This means every patient file should clearly and accurately convey who observed or recorded the data, which patient the file pertains to, and when the data was first obtained and recorded.

Ultimately, verifying data integrity not only helps healthcare organizations improve their own operations, but it also allows them to ensure that patients are cared for properly by preventing clinical decisions being made based on faulty or incomplete data.