> I also realized that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to use data from EMR out of the box. Medical data is dirty, intrinsically, because humans are complex things that do not fit easily in little boxes. Hence, if you want quality data, you have to think your data collection in advance, and motivate all your fellow doctors to check the little boxes correctly. For many years (we are talking about big data, no ?) Of course, there is some exceptions, but most of the time the data cleaning process is extremely hard to perform (however, if a dedicated team of people with medical knowledge is concentrated on this work, things could be different. I had to clean the data myself).

Paper charts everywhere. Post it in some files.

Wonder how much ML could help with mammogram. If you ever read one of these, you mostly use symmetry and check the previous ones to spot what changed.