Automatic extraction of electronic data is prevalent in 13 countries

Thirteen countries reported that data are automatically extracted from electronic clinical and administrative data systems to populate 80% or more of their key national health care datasets (Table 2.1). Electronic data often must be complemented with other data sources, however, to complete datasets or to obtain a high population coverage. The majority of countries are populating some of their health care datasets by extracting data from electronic clinical records automatically (Table 2.4). This method can improve the timeliness and accuracy of the data and indicates that the medical records have been digitised.

In a significant share of countries there is manual entry of data to health care datasets from paper clinical records. In several countries there is a combination of both methods that is needed due to differences across providers in their reporting capabilities. A smaller number of countries reported that the source of health care data was automatic extraction or manual data entry from claim or billing records. Claim or billing records were most heavily depended upon for health care data in Korea, Norway, Japan, Singapore and Sweden. The United States and the United Kingdom (England) also rely on claim or billing records for hospitalisation data. Most countries rely on claim or billing records for prescription medicines data. Questionnaires are rarely used to collect national health care data.

Table 2.4. Number of countries reporting sources of variables within national datasets

Source: Authors own calculations based on the results of this study.