Understanding Patient Data

An eight-part tour of what patient data actually is and how to work with it responsibly. It opens with the taxonomy of health data and the questions each kind can and can't answer, then where the data is captured, the medical coding systems that give it structure, and the identity and linkage problem of tying a person's records together. From there it covers privacy, law, and de-identification, the supply chain that moves data between systems, the quality and bias that shape what the data can and can't see, and finally how all of it comes together into a real service.