Reliability Of Vaccination Status in the EPR (part 2)

I utilise data from an unknown NHS Trust to determine the reliability of vaccination status as encoded in the electronic patient record (EPR)

In part 1 of this series I unleashed an attack on the EPR using machine learning once again, this time to establish the reliability of vaccination status flags. Identification of the NHS number for each and every hospital admission is far from straightforward such that once upon a time I managed a dedicated team that would endeavour to fill the holes left by admissions clerks in order to link as many people as possible to national audits. Data holes are a fact of clinical life and the hallowed NHS ID is no exception. Holes, combined with transcription errors operating in separate patient management systems, are going to lead to incomplete data capture. In terms of the vaccination record this is going to lead to a default coding of unvaccinated at death. Whoops indeed. This is not a good thing if you want to assess vaccine efficacy in an honest manner.

A predictive model was produced that performed exceptionally well, indicating the NHS ID hole could be as big as 11% of cases or thereab…