Objective: The main purpose of our study was to subjectively assess the quality of a paediatric intensive care unit (PICU) database according to the Directory of Clinical Databases (DoCDat) criteria.
Design and setting: A survey was conducted between April 1 and June 15, 2018, among the Sainte Justine PICU research group.
Population: Every member of this group whose research activity required the use of the database and/or who was involved in the development/validation of the database.
Interventions: None.
Measurements and main results: All 10 research team members (one Information Technology specialist, one junior medical student, and eight clinician researchers) who used the high-resolution database fulfilled the survey (100% response rate). The median quality level of the Sainte Justine PICU database across all the 10 criteria was 3 (2-4), rated on a 1 (worst) to 4 (best) numeric scale. When compared with previously assessed databases through the DoCDat criteria, we found that the Sainte Justine PICU database performance was similar.
Conclusions: The PICU high-resolution database appeared of good quality when subjectively assessed by the DoCDat criteria. Further validation procedures are mandatory. We suggest that data quality assessment and validation procedures should be reported when creating a new database.
Keywords: DoCDat; database; quality assessment.
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.