Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Cause Analysis, data collection and analysis, evaluation and decision-making toolkits

Data that is inaccurate, incomplete, inconsistent or out of date can seriously impact business intelligence efforts. Very early in the development of IT, we discovered that wise old dictum of garbage in, garbage out. GIGO, the catchy acronym for this dictum, reinforced the point that in this discipline, as well as most others, the ingredients and raw materials are essential if you want a good end product. Just as you cannot make a good apple pie with rotten apples, you cannot produce useful reports with bad data. GIGO is particularly important in the context of business intelligence (BI) because, by definition, business intelligence is supposed to provide us with insights into our business needs from the bits and bytes we have collected.

This presentation outlines a methodology to improve quality and accessibility of health care with greater involvement of the community in defining, implementing and monitoring the quality improvement process.

The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and other partners are working with National Programs to achieve ambitious goals to mitigate the effects of the HIV and AIDS pandemic. Measuring success and improving management in these initiatives is predicated on strong monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems that produce quality data. In the spirit of the M&E component of the Three Ones,1 a group of multilateral and bilateral organizations have collaborated to develop three tools to help programs and projects improve the data management and reporting aspects of their M&E systems and to improve overall data quality. Also refer to the RDQA Tool under SAMEA's Self Assessment weblink category

ISO Standards, assessment and certification

NACCHO Quality Improvement Resources - Health

Quality Improvement Methodology

Quality Portal Free registration Required

U.S. Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, "Quality Standards for Inspection and Evaluation," Jan 2012.

Strategic Information M&E Data Quality Resources