The Bad Data Germ
How important is your data? Look no further than the current struggle at Healthcare.gov. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent developing the website, today’s Wall Street Journal article points out that “Insurers say the federal health-care marketplace is generating flawed data that is straining their ability to handle (enrollees).”What specifically is going on? “Emerging errors include duplicate enrollments, spouses reported as children, missing data fields…” Essentially, bad data entering the system is killing the business processes the data is supposed to support.
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Bad data is a germ. Once it invades the system, the business gets sicker and sicker, the germ spreads into other systems, and getting healthy requires more and more intervention and more costs as time goes by. For example, if an ACORD submission contains the wrong data, that germ is going to infect the policy issuance, the payroll process, and the claims processing. What happens if the ACORD contains a misspelled client name? The policy is issued using the erroneous spelling. However, payroll is uploaded using the correct spelling. The payroll upload is looking for a client name it cannot find. In a related situation, a claim is created and the TPA is attempting to attach the claim to the correct client. However, it can’t find the correct client name, so the claim is orphaned. In both scenarios, hours of work, across days or weeks of time, are spent trying to reconcile the situation. All the while, the business has no data or incorrect data with which to make decisions and take action. The cost of a simple spelling error up front is literally thousands of dollars. Too many of these data germs in the system and the business can become blind to the key metrics needed to compete, or even more dire, cease to function effectively in the marketplace. There are best practices businesses can use to prevent bad data from entering their systems, and to cleanse bad data from the systems once it does get in. Those details are for another discussion.
The bottom line for this post is…Data is not the byproduct of a business, it is the lifeblood. As such, business leaders need to treat data as a vital business asset, concentrate on creating and maintaining good data, and do everything possible to prevent bad data from coursing through their veins.
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