Introduction to Medical Informatics
Lecture-2
Data, Information and Knowledge
Prepared by Lecturer :
Dalya Samer
Definitions
Data are symbols or observations reflecting
differences in the world. (Note: data is the plural of
datum) Example = 250.00
Information is data with meaning.
Example = ICD-9 code of 250.00 means type 2
diabetes
Knowledge is information that is justifiably believed
to be true. Example = obese patients are more likely
to develop type 2 diabetes
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Data Types
➢ Computers generate and analyze binary information:
zero (off) and one (on).
➢ Each zero or one is a bit; a series of 8 bits is a byte.
Note that these bits and bytes have no meaning
Data Types
➢ Bits can occur as various data types:
▪ Integers such as 345 or 99
▪ Floating point numbers such as 14.1 or 3.14159
▪ Characters such as ‘a’ or ‘z’
▪ Character strings such as “hello” or “goodbye”
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Data Formats
➢ Data can be aggregated into a variety of
formats such as: image files (JPG, GIG,
PNG), text files, sound files (WAV,
MP3) or video files (WMV, MP4)
➢ Recognize that these formats do not
define what information is available,
just the category format
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Data to Information
•Data lacks meaning ,dates and other qualifiers to gain
significance. For example, blood glucose = 127. mg/dl
•Vocabularies help convert data into information.
•The computer stores only data, not information. Thus, only a
human can determine whether the meaning is preserved or not.
•Everything must be defined, otherwise computer B will not
understand information transmitted from computer A.
( transmission of information between the source and the received
computers must shared correctly).
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Information to Knowledge
▪ Information is required to produce knowledge.
▪ Transformation of information (meaningful data) into
knowledge (justified, true belief) is a core goal of
science.
▪ A data warehouse is a system that pulls together data
from many different sources within an organization for
reporting and analysis.
▪ Clinical Data Warehouses (CDWs) is a modern
informatics techniques that are designed to convert
clinical information into knowledge.
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Electronic Health Record(EHR)
➢EHRs are now a huge source of
healthcare data and information.
They contain both:
• Structured data such as billing
codes, lab results (e.g., Sodium
= 140 mg/dl), problem lists (e.g.,
162.9 = “Lung Neoplasm” ),
medication lists, etc.
•Unstructured text (free text or
natural language)
➢Interpreting free text requires Natural language processing (NLP)
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Clinical Data Warehouse
▪ Data from multiple sources including EHRs,
Radiology, Pathology, etc. are copied into a staging
database where they are cleaned and loaded into
another common database and associated with
metadata (data that describes data).
▪ ICD-type data is an example of metadata.
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▪ Once the data loaded into a CDW, a variety of
analytics can be applied and the results presented to
the user via a user interface.
▪ CDWs are designed to support queries about
groups (e.g., average age of patients with breast
cancer). In contrast to EHRs, databases that support
EHRs are designed for updating and retrieval of
individual data. (e.g., Joan Smith’s age)
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Clinical Data Warehouse
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What Makes Informatics Difficult?
▪ With other industries such as banking, data and
information are much closer (smaller semantic
gap).
▪ For example, banking data such as $100.50 is close
to an account balance of $100.50. It leaves little
leeway for a different interpretation
▪ In healthcare, there are factors (“I feel sick”) that
are difficult to measure and vary from patient to
patient and physician to physician.
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What Makes Informatics Difficult?
▪ It is difficult to model all of healthcare. View the
HL7 RIM model on next slide
▪ Biomedical informatics is difficult due to
incomplete, imprecise, vague, inconsistent and
uncertain information
▪ Humans can adapt to this dynamic and vague
information but computers can not.
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HL7 version 3 RIM model
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Conclusions
▪ Computer scientists focus on data, while
informaticists focus on information
▪ There is a gap between healthcare data and
information
▪ The transformation of information into knowledge is
a primary goal of informaticists
▪ Clinical data warehouses are used to research clinical
questions and generate knowledge from information
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