E-Variance: An Application to Assure Clinical Data Integrity and Improve Patient Safety and Workflows in Electronic Medical Records.

Objective: Ensuring critical data integrity practices are often missing from the confidence of decision-making in the recorded clinical data. Thus, we developed an application to report clinical data errors to provide effective healthcare IT services and maintain clinical data integrity. Materials and Methods: The RadOnc E-Variance web-based application was designed and developed to report data inconsistencies and variances noted during clinical operations. The data inconsistency issues can be reported in 3 broad categories: Patient-related, Non-Patient related, and other suggestions/open-ended, allowing uploading of images or document files. The contents presented on the web are dynamically created in the application and are stored in a database. In the back-end, data analytics and detailed assessments are available on the dashboard. Users reporting variances remain anonymous to ensure reporting freely and frequently. Results: Once implemented clinically, we have found significant improvements with fewer errors, ensured patient treatment safety, and improved workflows in our state-wide clinics. Conclusion: The RadOnc E-Variance application effectively increases patient safety by ensuring data integrity and minimises risks in the EMR applications at multifaceted enterprise levels of hospital environments by reducing the inconsistencies in data recording and errors recorded in electronic health records.