As value-based payment models become increasingly prevalent across the country, more healthcare systems and practices are participating in risk-laden contracts. Being successful in risk contracts requires practices to make many changes, including changes to workflows, staffing composition, approaches to patient engagement and physician compensation models. One of the most fundamental changes required for success is for practices to truly become “data-driven organizations.” This is a term that is commonly applied to non-healthcare companies and organizations, and in that context, much is written about what it takes to become a data-driven organization. In a recent Upside article, the author outlines characteristics of data-driven companies. These characteristics include: I believe we are making great strides in creating truly data-driven healthcare organizations. Leadership teams in healthcare have always led with passion and a strong sense of mission, and many are now rapidly realizing that rich multisourced data is essential for their success. Creating practice- and organization-wide culture shifts is a slow process, particularly in the healthcare industry where there is still a strong tendency to do things a certain way because “this is how we always have done it”—in spite of having data that points to the need for a new or different course. Many systems still have much of their revenue coming from fee-for-service payment models where data is less critical and success is guaranteed as long as volumes of care are maintained. Creating unencumbered access to data across healthcare organizations poses many challenges. The first barrier was historically the absence of structured data that could be accessed. This was remedied with the broad implementation of electronic health records, but this after all is a relatively recent change. Now that structured data is broadly available, the complexity and heterogeneity of the data, along with the need to fiercely protect the privacy of the data, at times encumbers and slows access and flow of data within healthcare organizations. It is not unusual to encounter healthcare systems where data is segregated in certain domains in the organization with limited access to the data across the rest of the organization.