Dashboards and models can only ever be as good as the data feeding them. In digital health, poor data quality quietly undermines every decision built on top of it.
Three habits that improve data quality
- Validate at the point of entry. Catching an error when it is typed is far cheaper than correcting it months later.
- Make definitions explicit. Agree on what each indicator means and how it is calculated.
- Monitor continuously. Treat quality as an ongoing process, not a one-off cleanup.
A simple check
Even a basic query can surface problems early. For example, finding visits recorded with a visit_date in the future:
SELECT id, visit_date
FROM visits
WHERE visit_date > CURRENT_DATE;You cannot improve what you cannot trust.