Assessing the effect of electronic health information exchange on the completeness and validity of data for measuring viral load testing turnaround time in Nigeria.

Implementation of health information exchange has been shown to result in several benefits which includes the improvement in the completeness and timeliness of data for public health program monitoring and surveillance. The objective of this study was to assess the effect of implementing an electronic health information exchange (HIE) on the quality of data available to measure HIV viral load testing turnaround time (TAT) in Nigeria. We measured viral load data validity and completeness before the implementation of electronic health information exchange, and 6 months after implementation. Records of specimens collected at 30 healthcare facilities and tested in 3 Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) labs were analyzed. We define data completeness as the percentage of non-missing values and measured this value by specimens and by data elements in the dataset for calculating TAT. To examine data validity, we classified TAT segments with negative values and date fields that were not in International Organization for Standardization(ISO) standard date format as invalid. Validity was measured by specimens and by each TAT segment. Pearson's chi square was used to assess for improvements in validity and completeness post implementation of HIE. 15,226 records of specimens were analyzed at baseline and 18,022 records of specimens analyzed at endline. Data completeness for all specimens recorded increased significantly from 47% before HIE implementation to 67% six months after implementation (p < 0.01). Data validity also increased from 90% before implementation to 91% after implementation (p < 0.01) CONCLUSION: Our study demonstrated evidence of significant improvement in the quality of data available to measure viral load turnaround time with the implementation of HIE.

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Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.