Data Cleansing

WHAT IS DATA CLEANSING?
Data cleansing is the practice of regularly sorting and culling information in your practice software.  Some of the ways we can do this is by:
  • Marking patients who have not attended the practice for two years as inactive
  • When marking patients as deceased, remove all recalls, reminders and outstanding requests
  • Regular maintenance of database fields
HOW WILL IT BENEFIT YOUR PRACTICE?
Data cleansing will save you time as address book entries, data fields, templates and document categories will not be duplicated.
 
Embarrassing errors such as sending out recall letters to deceased patients will be ceased. No more inaccurate referrals with ceased medications or duplicate entries in past history.
 
The data that you use every day from your clinical software helps you in a range of ways:
  • Reports
  • Recalls and reminder lists
  • Practice planning for demographic needs
  • Identifying CDM at risk patients
  • Medicare compliance audits
  • Education Audits such as NPS
Your expectation is that the data that you are using is accurate but in many cases this is not so.
 
The act of data cleansing ensures that the data you are using is up to date and accurate - giving you confidence to use clinical software reports and lets you get the most out of advanced external data extraction tools such as Canning or Pen tools.  
 
Although your initial data cleanse may be a tedious task, when done on a regular basis this routine will ensure you have the highest quality data to work with.
 
RESOURCES