Data management for intervention effectiveness research: comparing deductive and inductive approaches.

Management approaches are needed to prepare intervention data sets for research. We identified four management approaches and applied them to Omaha System intervention data from 15 home care agencies (621,385 interventions provided to 2,862 patients). Classifying intervention data created differing numbers of distinct groups for deductive approaches labeled as action category (four groups), theoretical (5), and clinical expert consensus (23). One inductive, data-driven approach generated 150 groups of interventions, of which 24 were meaningful and unique. Interventions in deductive groups were mutually exclusive, and approaches mapped readily according to intervention action terms. The novel, overlapping, inductive groups consisted of diverse actions for multiple problems. The four management approaches created meaningful intervention groups to be employed in future outcomes evaluation studies.