Tools for Taking Data Quality into Your Own Hands

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The NSSP BioSense Platform hosts several tools that can assist sites in monitoring timeliness, completeness, and validity of Priority 1 and 2 data elements. These data elements are essential to ensuring the usability and meaningfulness of your syndromic surveillance data. During new site and new facility onboarding, NSSP typically requires completeness of Priority 1 elements that is 90% or higher to successfully process data per NSSP business rules. Once a site has been onboarded, we recommend that site personnel continue to work on the completeness of Priority 2 elements because these are meaningful to interpreting data trends.

Combined, the following tools provide a thorough approach to monitoring Priority 1 and 2 data elements:

  • The NSSP Data-Quality-on-Demand (DQOD) tool, collocated with SAS Studio, can be used to create data quality reports that contain count and percent of completeness at both visit and message levels. The SAS Studio Quick Start Guide provides step-by-step guidance for accessing SAS Studio, setting up user workspace, and running the suite of DQOD programs successfully.
  • The NSSP Data Quality Dashboard can assist in monitoring the completeness and validity of a subset of Priority 2 data elements. Users can create histograms displaying percent of data element completeness at a visit level and percent of element validity at a message level. Users can view data for the last 120 days and further refine the underlying query by Feed, Parent Organization, Vendor, Facility Type, and Facility Name and even investigate individual data elements. Once a histogram or plot has been completed, users have the option to download as a PNG file for additional use. The Dashboard User Manual is an excellent tool that provides details on how this is done and describes how sites can use this enhanced functionality.
  • Our trusted data visualization and syndromic surveillance component of the BioSense Platform, ESSENCE, hosts completeness, validity, and timeliness reports for key data quality elements. Users have the flexibility to change the period of evaluation and facilities included and to obtain visit-level data quality metrics.

If you have questions about the tools listed above, please submit a ticket to the NSSP Service Desk. We can answer your questions and work with you to improve data quality.

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