Project's overview
The MBDS portal aims to integrate different datasets in a normalised database according to the Criteria established in the Spanish Official Bulletin Number 306, published on December 21, 2011.
With the purpose of easing the data collecting process, a set of customised file templates were defined for the healthcare entities. This allows the systematic exportation of their information reducing the mistake appearance in the process.
The templates define the position of the MBDS variables available in the file as well as their format. The format types supported are delimited and fixed width text files. Templates can also contain correspondences that allow mapping the original set of codes used by the entities with the standard ones.
Data validation
Each individual MBDS record is validated, and a detailed description of all detected errors is displayed in the user interface. All errors have a severity level customizable by the administrators. Some of them will have a critical severity and would invalidate a record in the case of appearance. The rest of the errors would just be shown as warnings. The application computes a lot of quality controls including date coherence and variable code validation (including diagnostic procedure vocabulary codes). As these controls are computed in real time the portal can be used as a data cleaning tool.
The record dump process is completed using a wizard with several steps, and can be restarted if any errors were detected. The portal also has dump management, and records can be overwritten in a future dump.
There is an exportation module designed for data quality and case mix analysis.
References
The MBDS collecting project was awarded with the "Transparency Award" in the Quality Awards in the National Health System in 2010 by the Quality Agency of the Ministry of Health.
By using the application developed by Predictia, MUFACE was able to collect the 66,8% of the hospital discharges from the MUFACE beneficiaries treated in private hospitals in 2010, compared to the 18% collected during 2009. In 2011 the coverage increased to over 80%.