Lots of questions being raised about @Surgisphere data analyses in @NEJM and @TheLancet. Others have already done some good work on this...
...so I'm going to focus on something curious that I noticed when I decided to actually read these papers instead of just skimming (will totally admit that I had not been paying very close attention to this until yesterday).
@Surgisphere is supposedly integrating data from hundreds of hospitals around the world, all different continents, that is supposedly The Very Biggest Data if you read most of their description.
But both papers include this passage that seems a bit puzzling to me: "A manual data entry process is used for quality assurance and validation to ensure that key missing values are kept to a minimum" (Lancet) and
"A manual data-entry process is used for quality assurance and validation." (NEJM)
I thought that (if we're giving this the benefit of the doubt and assuming the database really exists) it was all pulled automatically from hospital EHR's.
Where does any "manual data entry" come into this? Who is doing the "manual data entry" part of this process and where? Are they referring to data entry that is done at the hospitals?
