Data Profiling in Support of Entity Resolution of Multi-Institutional EHR Data.

Information Quality (IQ) is a core tenant of contemporary data management practices. Across many disciplines and industries, it has become a necessary process to improve value and reduce liability in data driven processes. Information quality is a multifaceted discipline with many degrees of complexity in implementation, especially in healthcare. Data profiling is one of the simpler tasks that an organization can perform to understand and monitor the intrinsic quality of its data. This case study demonstrates the application of core concepts of data profiling to entity resolution of multi-institutional Electronic Health Record (EHR) data. We discuss the benefits of using data profiling to better understand quality issues and their impact on entity resolution and how data profiling might be augmented to increase utility to clinical data.