Trusting Healthcare Data

John Lynn | Hospital EMR & EHR | August 9, 2013

Healthcare is generating data at an unprecedented rate. EHR software is becoming a large repository of healthcare data. Patient portals are starting to get data from patients. Labs are creating large amounts of data. Insurance companies have been collecting and playing with data for years. We’re surrounded by healthcare data. The question is: How do we make sure they trust the data?

Anyone who has worked with an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) realizes what a challenge it is to make sure that the day you pull in from multiple systems can be trusted. It’s really hard to trust data that’s coming from a system that you don’t understand or use regularly. When you use the system regularly you have an idea of how it captures the data and the strengths and weaknesses of the data. When the data is in the EDW, you don’t often know those details.