Dr. Grauman,
You are quite correct in that the problem truly is a human factor. Between employees having a bad day, employee turnover, and employee incompetence from that one bad apple everyone hires now and then, there will be data that is not in the best of shape. However, I must say I find your reasoning for manually re-entering all that data to be flawed. The reason is simple: mistakes do happen. A very good practice will have 10% bad data pretty much all the time. That is data not entered correctly such as misspelled names, missing or incorrect birthdates (i.e. 1/12/73 instead of 11/12/73), incorrect or missing genders, etc.
You are saying that by manually re-entering all that data that your staff cleaned up a bunch of junk along the way. Granted. But what about the fresh mistakes they made along the way? Of course, I agree that your approach my produce cleaner data, but for how long? How long before things are back the way they were? Will that short reprieve be worth the money you spent on all that employee labor?
What's the difference between your spending all that money in labor to clean things up somewhat for a short time versus me importing your data for you at a lower cost and providing you reports on patients with missing last names, missing birthdates, etc.?
At what point are we pulling the dagger out of our right leg to allow that leg to heal only to sheath that dagger in the other leg?
JamesNT
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