January 23, 2025
Data quality reporting is an essential part of BioGrid’s services to our clients, ensuring that they can be confident about the conclusions they draw from data that is collected, and this is the role Nicole Marrow performs at BioGrid.
Prior to BioGrid, Nicole was with Monash University’s School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine for ten years working on the Australian & New Zealand Society of Cardiac & Thoracic Surgeons (ANZSCTS) Cardiac Surgery Database on behalf of the Society. The Cardiac Surgery Database collects and analyses data from Australia and New Zealand for a range of clinically relevant surgical outcomes for the purpose of monitoring cardiac surgical unit performance. Nicole’s role was coordinating participating sites, doing reporting and managing these data.
Since starting with BioGrid, Nicole has implemented data quality reports for projects BioGrid is currently working on. Data quality reports measure how well a data set meets criteria for accuracy, completeness, validity, consistency, uniqueness, timeliness and fit for purpose.
Nicole brings to her role a deep understanding of the relationship between data and real world outcomes, and the power of data to create understanding of complex situations, such as surgical outcomes.
This equips her to work closely with our clients to design their data quality reports, which may take a number of iterations before both Nicole and the client are confident the report will deliver the required results. This process is critical, as data quality reports will potentially be required for many years to identify trends, therefore the data set needs to be complete and data within the data set must follow data rules set during the planning stages.
BioGrid’s data quality reports enable project teams to identify and fix any emerging issues in the data collection process. In the long term, in situations covered by our clients’ projects, this can impact people’s treatment through decisions made by a health service based on data they’re seeing.
This is especially important when data is being ingested into a database from multiple sources across different sites.
Another example of the reporting Nicole provides is the iNAAN project, which is developing a digital penicillin allergy toolkit to help clinicians decide whether a patient has a low-risk penicillin allergy and may therefore be a good candidate for an oral challenge.
It’s critical for the iNAAN project to have reporting that enables the project team to assess participating site data completeness and accuracy. This process enhances the value of two-monthly electronic audit and feedback reports to participating sites about their own health service. These reports enable sites to examine their own local clinical effectiveness and implementation outcomes, with BioGrid data quality reporting ensuring that the audit and feedback reports are based on a reliable data set.
“Data quality is critical, because if data that goes into the database is not good, the information that comes out is not good or reliable either”, says Nicole.
“Then there’s the issue of completeness. Some registries use modelling in their analyses and you can’t do modelling if you don’t have all the relevant data for your registry patients.
“The usability of data quality reporting is also important. There's no point doing analyses if it’s not interpretable.”
Like Nicole, Andrew is highly experienced in working with data that is applied to real world health uses, coming to BioGrid from the software development industry and, just prior to that, working with health monitors capturing citizen data from surveys and smartwatches. These data captured were used in an application that allowed the user to understand their health strengths and weaknesses.
He shares with Nicole a deep understanding of the importance of clearly defining what outcomes a project requires and then mapping how data will support this.
Andrew’s role at BioGrid is to capture project user requirements and, while he’s at it, develop better ways to do this.
Andrew describes himself as a systems thinker, skilled at capturing concepts and turning them into detailed requirements – in other words, making ideas reality.
“We build sophisticated solutions that are very technical in nature, and many of our team are exceptionally skilled in very deep domains. My role is to ensure at the start of the project that the client’s requirements and what BioGrid does are aligned and understood, and work together to achieve the outcomes the project needs, so that our domain specialists can confidently do their job based on the documented requirements,” says Andrew.
He’s also refining BioGrid’s documentation standards from the business requirements phase right down to the ‘Extract, Transform, Load’ operational phase, ensuring complete, detailed and auditable documentation throughout the project life cycle.
This is essential as it supports shared understanding between all parties through all stages of a project, and provides structure for ensuring efficient processes that cover the necessary actions at the appropriate points.
In addition to his core role, Andrew is enhancing BioGrid’s process of continuous improvement in the software development space using documentation and process standardisation.
The similarity in Nicole’s and Andrew’s roles is ‘getting it right from the beginning’ – they work to ensure that our clients’ time and funding is used as efficiently as possible by ensuring clarity in requirements and expectations.