Garbage In, Garbage Out? Negative Impact of Physiological Waveform Artifacts in a Hospital Clinical Data Warehouse

Hospitals around the world are deploying increasingly advanced systems to collect and store high-resolution physiological patient data for quality improvement and research. However, data accuracy, completeness, consistency, and contextual validity remain issues. This report highlights a data artifact known as waveform clipping in our hospital’s physiological data capture system that went unnoticed for years, limiting data analysis and delaying several research projects. We aim to raise awareness in the medical informatics community about the importance of careful system setup, ongoing data validation, and close cooperation between clinicians and data scientists.