Contents >>
Quality Assurance of clerically reviewed record pairs
QUALITY ASSURANCE OF CLERICALLY REVIEWED RECORD PAIRS
Quality assurance (QA) techniques were applied to clerical review, which involved having a sample of the clerical record pairs reviewed a second time by a different reviewer. If a decision made to a QA record pair conflicted with the decision made in the original clerical review, this was identified as an 'adjudication' pair.
Performing QA on clerically reviewed record pairs enabled a basic measure of quality, referred to as a 'clerical review consistency rate' (CR), to be obtained. This rate is calculated by dividing the number of adjudication pairs against the total number of record pairs that were quality assured. Note that the CR is not strictly an estimate of clerical review accuracy, rather it is a measure of the level of consistency with which different coders applied decisions to record pairs. Neither the QA or Adjudication results were used to supplement the final linked results. Nevertheless, the fact that adjudication identified only 37 of the 3,000 record pairs that were quality assured (CR of 96.8%) gives a very positive indication of the accuracy of the clerical review process.
Table 2.5 - QUALITY ASSURED RECORD PAIRS, By pass number
 | Pass 1 | Pass 2 | Pass 3 | Pass 4 | Pass 5 | Total |
|
| Originally reviewed pairs | 12 088 | 6 058 | 6 717 | 1 500 | 1 738 | 28 101 |
| Quality assured pairs | 1 290 | 590 | 760 | 80 | 280 | 3 000 |
| Adjudicated pairs | 34 | 46 | 11 | 3 | 3 | 97 |
| | | | | | |
| Clerical review consistency rate (%) | 97.4 | 92.2 | 98.6 | 96.3 | 98.9 | 96.8 |
|
Record pairs that were automatically assigned or clerically confirmed as links during a pass were not able to be linked again in any later passes. However, records from pairs that were deemed to be non-links were available to be linked again in later passes.
Print Page
Print All