Enhancing Healthcare Data Quality in Regional Referral Hospitals: Does Self-Regulation of Healthcare Workers Matter?

Abstract

Introduction: The global healthcare industry relies on high-quality data to support informed decision-making, inform policy, and improve health outcomes. Human error during data entry is a leading source of data quality issues. Thus, this study assessed the perceived healthcare data quality (accuracy, completeness, timeliness, consistency) and determined whether healthcare workers’ self-regulation skills (emotional self-control, adaptability, trustworthiness) are associated with data quality.

Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted across eight regional referral hospitals in Tanzania, employing simple random sampling. A total of 336 healthcare workers participated in the study. Data were collected through a structured questionnaire and analyzed using Excel and IBM SPSS version 27. Perceived healthcare data quality levels were categorized according to percentile-based thresholds. Multiple linear regression was used to examine the relationships between healthcare workers' three self-regulation skills and the four dimensions of data quality.

Results: Findings indicated that 65.2% of healthcare workers rated the quality of healthcare data as moderate, 31.5% rated it as high, and 3.3% rated it as low. Emotional self-control and trustworthiness were positively and statistically significantly associated with healthcare data quality, whereas adaptability was negatively associated. Emotional self-control predicted higher scores across all data-quality subdomains (β range = 0.260–0.674; all p < 0.001). Adaptability showed consistent negative associations (β range = −0.311 to −0.461, all p < 0.001). Trustworthiness was positively associated with healthcare data quality (β range = 0.145–0.725; p ≤ 0.001). Models explained 40.4–55.9% of variance in subdomain scores (R² range = 0.404–0.559).

Conclusion: The study concludes that healthcare data quality is currently moderate, indicating satisfactory but improvable quality. It underscores the critical role of self-regulation, particularly emotional self-control and trustworthiness, among healthcare workers in improving data quality and advocates for the implementation of targeted training programs and mentorship programs to strengthen healthcare workers’ self-regulation, ethical awareness, and decision-making in data management.