A growing demand for unaltered and unformatted data, especially for research and analytics efforts, has introduced "the lake" into the health IT lexicon, according to a report from the Brookings Institution.
The idea of a data lake is a scalable repository where silos are very minimal and data is no longer confined to its initial structure. Applications would exist within the cloud and be able to more freely access data. A report in Forbes cites data platform Hadoop as one of the first companies to move toward the lake.
The Brookings Institution says the data in these lakes will be both pure and unclean. Because current databases and other storage methods usually involve formatting the data in some way, raw data in a lake will allow it to be analyzed in its original, pre-formatted state by new technologies able to handle unstructured, undefined data. Lakes could also be helpful in aggregating patient data from a variety of sources with fewer interoperability concerns, according to the report.
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