Data quality of drug-resistant tuberculosis and antiretroviral therapy electronic registers in South Africa.

Background: To assess the quality and completeness of treatment and outcome data in the electronic tuberculosis (TB) and antiretroviral treatment (ART) registers in drug-resistant (DR-) TB patients at three treatment facilities in South Africa.

Methods: We did a retrospective cohort study using routinely-collected data from DR-TB registers of rifampicin resistant adults (≥18 years old), on ART, initiating DR-TB treatment between January 2012 and December 2013. We linked patient information from the DR-TB register to the ART register using patient identifiers and an algorithm based on string edit distance and date of birth.