Is Skinny Data Harder Than Big Data?

On my post about Improving the Quality of EHR data for Healthcare Analytics, Glenn made a really great comment that I think is worth highlighting.

Power to change outcomes starts with liberating the data. Then transforming all that data into information and finally into knowledge. Ok – Sorry, that’s probably blindingly obvious. But skinny-data is a good metaphor because you don’t need to liberate ALL the data. And in fact the skinny metaphor covers what I refer to as the data becoming information part (filter out the noise). Selective liberation and combination into a skinny warehouse or skinny data platform is also manageable. And then build on top of that the analytics that release the knowledge to enable better outcomes. Now …if only all those behemoth mandated products would loosen up on their data controls…

His simple comment “filter out the noise” made me realize that skinny data might actually be much harder to do than big data. If you ask someone to just aggregate all the data, that is a generally pretty easy task. Once you start taking on the selection of data that really matters, it becomes much harder. This is likely why so many Enterprise Data Warehouses sit their basically idle. Knowing which data is useful, making sure it is collected in a useful way, and then putting that data to use is much harder than just aggregating all the data.

Dana Sellers commented on this in this Hospital EHR and Healthcare Analytics video interview I did (the whole video has some great insights). She said that data governance is going to be an important challenge going forward. Although she defined data governance as making sure that you’re collecting the data in a way that you know what that data really means and how it can be used in the future. That’s a powerful concept and one that most people haven’t dug into very much. They’re going to have to if they want to start using their data for good.

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.

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