Data Cleansing

Data Cleansing could be a good way of leading to a better service.

It can be said that we need data cleansing as data can be a bit of a baggage that we are made to carry around and as a result can weigh us down. In terms of data cleansing, it is important in data migration to not just be thinking of saving everything as this means you would need protection for all of the data that you are keeping. One of the greatest assets a company has is the information that it keeps and so it needs data cleansing and to be kept professionally and safely and needs to be accessible at the same time. You need to be able to sort through your data in an efficient manner and data cleansing can help with this, At System C we deal with a lot of medical institutions who collect thousands up thousands of patients data that needs data cleansing and data about medical products and suppliers.

This information has to be stored but also the organisation must also make decisions about data cleansing and which information is most important and how after data cleansing it is organised in order to retrieve it easily. This is because they need to have good systems of access in order to see this information when it is needed. Data cleansing (which is the term given to the concept of sorting through a large volume of data and taking out the out-dated or inaccurate or wrongly formatted or duplicated data) can be a data cleansing help, but those who need the service must realise it is not the �be all and end all� answer. This is because there is a problem in that with data cleansing is that there are many different sources for the information. In terms of data cleansing, there is a moment where a new patient record or new medical product order is made and this is when data is needed instantaneously. Data cleansing can help if you need to know if and when the product has been ordered before and how much, or you need to know if the patient has been with you before and for how long and for what reason!

Data cleansing: Wading through the data and making it easier on staff

The system that the organisation has set up should be able to sift through the many names which are common and to distinguish between them in order to find the right one you are looking for � which data cleansing can help with. Data cleansing therefore helps the staff who are doing these sorts of searches as data cleansing guides them through multiple names and then can earmark potential errors that could arise. However there can be obstacles to this data cleansing, which might be: what if there is more than one account or the patient has moved and the new address has not been keyed in correctly and the account can't be found? Data cleansing and then integrating this information can be very problematic.

If there are two hospitals for example and they need to merge their records, data cleansing can help, but is not an all-encompassing solution. The data cleansing algorithms can make a correlated association between multiple records that appear on the screen, but this information would need to have been inputted correctly in the first place for data cleansing programs to work. The fact is that the data cleansing is only as effective as the information that has been inputted and it is a fact that eighty percent of data cleansing problems originate from the human error factor.

System C's data cleansing and data migration services

System C's data cleansing dept has extensive experience in planning, developing and executing complex data extract, transform and load (ETL) projects. This includes data cleansing situations where historical and current data must be extracted from more than one source system, merged, mapped and uploaded onto the new system after data cleansing. Successful data migration and data cleansing relies upon an intimate understanding of the data structures in both the source and target systems. In a healthcare setting the data cleansing involved is highly sensitive, and incorrectly migrated data poses a clinical risk, making this is critical area for any implementation. System C employs over 20 suitably experienced and qualified data cleansing and data migration experts and our staff have successfully migrated data from the majority of the UK's leading PAS systems and have experience of data cleansing.

System C can provide a range of services aimed at improving the quality of the data cleansing information stored in Trusts' patient management systems. For example we can assist NHS organisations planning to replace their data cleansing and legacy PAS systems in reaching a target of 95% of active patient records with a verified (status 01) NHS Number after data cleansing.