Medical devices and data analysis

Last week Fresh Air did an interview with Medical journalist Jeanne Lenzer, which had tie-ins to data which I found interesting and on-point. Specifically, the journalist found that what a reasonable person would consider as critical data, was not being gathered or released. In this case, the data was how many people medical devices killed. No recorded data, no deaths! It's data magic. Except in the real world, even if there is no data on it, people still were dying.

This type of situation is very common in the data world. Data must be created. Creating it takes resources and can lead to an understanding of a situation. Some stakeholders would like that knowledge to not happen and therefore choose not to create that data and avoid the whole analysis process. Or less nefariously, data may not exist on something you want to know. The reality is that while some things in the world are quite data-fied (credit card transactions, census data, etc)  most things in the world are not.

When approaching an analysis, to get a reliable result, you must approach it from a real-world context rather than a data context. That is you must base your data work on what real-world thing you want to know/take action on.

Looking at it from another direction. Say you lost your keys in a parking lot. Where would you look? You would probably look along the path you walked, even if it was dark and without lighting. Looking only where there were parking lot lights, where it would easy to see, would be silly because your keys might not be only in the easy place.

A real-world approach based on what you want to know can lead to real-world insights because you know what you are looking for. Focusing only on the data you have can leave critical blind spots where data is hidden or does not exist. In this case, regulatory authorities seem to have taken the "focus on the data approach", which led to a dangerous situation developing. On the other hand, the journalist took the real world approach and uncovered that situation.  Check it out from the link below.

Show link: https://www.npr.org/2018/01/17/578562873/are-implanted-medical-devices-creating-a-danger-within-us