THE DATA QUALITY HOSPITAL – Part 8 – “Stopping the bleeding” (free excerpt)
Paul Jones
Strategic Data & AI Leader @ Baringa ?? CDO ?? Consultant ?? Author ?? Speaker
Stopping the bleeding
Sometimes, there can be a problem that’s not immediately obviously linked to the data patient’s symptoms, which needs to be addressed urgently to stop things becoming worse for them.
For example, a wound could be cleaned up and bandaged, but it may keep on bleeding. Why? Quite often, a closer inspection will uncover the fact that there’s a piece of shrapnel in the wound keeping it open, or there’s hidden internal bleeding, which isn’t visible on the surface. In these cases, the shrapnel need to be removed, the internal bleed needs to be cauterised, and the wounds need stitches to truly stop it from bleeding.
Sometimes, to “stop the bleeding”, the data quality medical staff need to look back further into the data patient’s life to understand why they keep becoming ill or injuring themselves. Data people are not naturally sickly all on their own: it’s their environment and things that happen to them in life or at work that result in injury and illness. As a result, to properly treat an injury, it’s important to understand the root cause of it and address that. Otherwise, the data patient may go home and the wound could re-open or the illness could return, and the medical staff will be fighting a never-ending battle of cleaning and bandaging them.
You can sense that you’re getting closer to the kinds of actions that will make a real difference in the lives of data patients. Addressing the root cause of a data quality illness clearly needs to be a priority; but what if just stopping the bleeding still hasn’t fully resolved the problem? What if there’s an infection that is spreading, for which standard treatments aren’t working?
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