Healthcare Data Quality and The Complexity of Healthcare Analytics

The other day I had a really great chat with Khaled El Emam, PhD, CEO and Founder of Privacy Analytics. We had a wide ranging discussion about healthcare data analytics and healthcare data privacy. These are two of the most important topics in the healthcare industry right now and no doubt will be extremely important topics at healthcare conferences happening all through the year.

In our discussion, Khaled talked about what I think are the three most important challenges with healthcare data:

  1. Data Integrity
  2. Data Security
  3. Data Quality

I thought this was a most fantastic way to frame the discussion around data and I think healthcare is lacking in all 3 areas. If we don’t get our heads around all 3 pillars of good data, we’ll never realize the benefits associated with healthcare data.

Khaled also commented to me that 80% of healthcare analytics today is simple analytics. That means that only 20% of our current analysis requires complex analytics. I’m sure he was just giving a ballpark number to illustrate the point that we’re still extremely early on in the application of analytics to healthcare.

One side of me says that maybe we’re lacking a bit of ambition when it comes to leveraging the very best analytics to benefit healthcare. However, I also realize that it means that there’s still a lot of low hanging fruit out there that can benefit healthcare with even just simple analytics. Why should we go after the complex analytics when there’s still so much value to healthcare in simple analytics.

All of this is more of a framework for discussion around analytics. I’m sure I’ll be considering every healthcare analytics I see based on the challenges of data integrity, security and quality.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

1 Comment

  • If we are talking about healthcare data in general and not just for analytics then I’d suggest to add data availability to this list.

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