Training as an Intervention to Decrease Medical Record Abstraction Errors Multicenter Studies

Author(s):  Meredith Zozus, Leslie Young, Alan Simon, et al

What was done?

MRA training was delivered at the beginning of the study. The training consisted of a teaching session using an example case abstraction, followed by each trainee independently abstracting two test cases. Sixty-nine abstractors from 30 sites received the MRA training. The goal for each abstractor was to achieve an error rate no greater than 4.93%.

What was found?

Only 23% of the abstractors met their error rate goal during the training.

What do the results mean?

Study-specific MRA training can improve the quality of study data.  This project had several problems.  Creating the training test cases took a lot of time and effort.  When the training test cases were created, they contained errors that were not discovered before training began.  These errors were distracting and confusing to the abstractors. Lastly, there are many different EMR systems and it is impossible to train abstractors on all of them.

Why was this study conducted?

Searching medical records to find data for another use is called medical record abstraction (MRA).  The process is prone to errors, and many people question the quality of the data.  This project trained abstractors for a study that used MRA as the main source of data.

Appreciation:

The authors would like to thank the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institutes of Health for their support of this research.

You may learn more about this publication here:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30741251

The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.