ABSTRACT
It can be said that the aim of performance monitoring is to turn data into information. As Daniel Keys Moran put it, “you can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data”. This chapter concerns information’s raw materials. It’s impossible to list all the data sources, but they can be broadly categorised as administrative, clinical, incident reports, surveys and a variety of other types such as social media and population estimates. The suitability of each for the intended purpose will partly depend on their quality. As we’ll discuss, this can be defined in different ways but ultimately involves a subjective judgment of whether the source is “fit for purpose”. Are the data “good enough”? As our discussion of data sources will use various terms associated with data quality, we’ll begin by defining those terms to help with the summary of the data sources that then follows. We finish by considering a few other important issues such as ethics and costs.
