This infographic draws upon the unified clinical and claims data warehouse of Arcadia Healthcare Solutions to show the quantity of data available for 500 patients. Claims records are represented by the "above-ground" green bars – but they're dwarfed by the vast amount underlying electronic health record data, represented by the brown bars underneath.

It demonstrates how claims data, so longstanding and ubiquitous in healthcare analytics, are nonetheless relatively sparse – limited to "a handful of procedure codes and diagnoses for each episode," according to Arcadia.

Meanwhile, EHR data has "hundreds of valuable data points for each encounter, including social indicators, medical history, lab results, vitals, point of care observations, and more."

Still, this complexity is two-sided coin: it often goes underutilized (or unused) in favor of more familiar and accessible claims information. Arcadia shows that improved risk stratification and population health management means a combination of the two is far preferable than "even the most advanced analyses that rely on claims alone."

Click to enlarge.