Semantic data quality after EHR migration #substack #shorts

Here's what I'll say, where my head is at with data quality right now. A lot thinking about semantic data quality, like, do we know what this word means? Do we agree as an enterprise what this word means? And if we finally have done the hard work of the enterprise of agreeing as humans, this is our common language, is that version control stored other systems to record that decision so we don't remake that decision in 18 months when we all come back or new people come back and all this stuff. And so, I'm thinking about this a lot, I think, and part Part of it is the timing of, of my new role. I joined this company end of September and we got a new electronic health record system in March, which at a hospital means 80% of our data moved, the source system migrated. So it's a massive, massive disruptive event, but it also means it's an opportune moment to revisit like things like, okay, this new electronic health record says a visit, a hospital visit is X. Or an encounter is X, but in the old system it was different. And then people have different conceptions in the hospital. Those two things mean— and that affects a lot of metrics at a hospital because you care about visit volumes and admissions and readmissions and all these different things. And so we're having these like workshops, many hours with very expensive senior people deciding what these words mean. And I'm thinking, now where do I record that so that two different analysts in the hospital don't, 6 months from now, build dashboards that don't agree with each other and restart this loop again, where leaders are going, wait a second, what, what are we saying a visit is again? And so, like, that's where I'm thinking about data quality right now is like, meaning quality.