The Competencies Needed by Health Sector Information Quality Advocates

Abstract

Objectives:  1) To introduce to expert colleagues the concept of health sector information quality advocates. 2) To obtain these colleagues opinions on worth of the advocate role and the competencies needed by an advocate. 3) To identify existing courses that matched the needs of the advocacy role.

Design:  1) A workshop and pre-workshop survey of participants. 2) An online search of courses targeting a health workforce audience based on key words from the competencies identified by the workshop participants.

Setting:  The workshop was conducted at the 35th Patient Classification Systems International (PCSI) Conference in Iceland in September 2022. The pre-conference online survey used SurveyMonkey. The online course search used Google Chrome and Google Scholar and the English language.

Main outcome measures: 1) Agreement of expert colleagues on the need for an Information quality advocate role. 2) Consensus by the expert colleagues on the important competencies. 3) The identified courses described in terms of mode of course delivery, course cost and duration, the delivering institute and key competencies covered. Each course was assessed and scored on a scale from 0 to 10 based on comprehensiveness and effectiveness.

Results: The top five competencies for the information quality advocate in order of importance were data governance principles, quality management, stakeholder engagement, information and system governance, and information culture. The online search results identified many courses for specific technical roles, but most did not have the focus on data validity, reliability and information usefulness that matched the needs of the advocacy role.

Conclusions: Focused training is needed to support appropriately skilled information quality advocates for the health sector. The presence of information quality advocates at the point of data collection facilitates the pathway to best practice in data collection.