Minimum data cleaning recommendations for infection prevention and control acute care surveillance reporting: A solution for "garbage in, garbage out".

Background: Outcome surveillance is an important component of infection prevention and control (IPAC) programs to guide healthcare decisions. It is crucial that the reported data are of the highest quality. Reviewing completeness, accuracy and timeliness of the data is important to reduce data inconsistencies. However, many IPAC staff do not have training in data cleaning or data quality activities. Methods: Expert epidemiologists across Canada have created best practice guidance for data quality activities to provide sufficient detail to improve this important patient safety activity. Most of these activities are simple checks to review the accuracy of the data without requiring additional review of the patient record or linkage to other datasets. Results: Based on consensus by surveillance experts across jurisdictions, comprehensive recommendations for data quality in IPAC surveillance programs were developed to improve completeness (22%), accuracy (68%), and timeliness (10%) of the data. Conclusion: The data quality activities list may be used in Canadian IPAC surveillance activities to support or improve existing surveillance data quality activities for IPAC programs.