The blind men of the parable went on debating whether the elephant was like a winnowing basket (ear), or a plowshare (tusk), or a plow (trunk), or a pillar (foot), by touching only one part of the body. However, instead of fighting for their own beliefs, they could possibly try to build an image of the animal by combining all their data. That’s data-linking, of course. People have become smarter, and gather information from different sources by creating a new and richer dataset, which is of tremendous help in policy making.
Linkages among medical databases, such as electronic health records (EHRs),
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