Distinguishing knowledge from data
| Patient data | Clinical knowledge | |
| Who it applies to | A single patient | Every patient |
| Where it comes from | A single patient | Research on many patients |
| Forms it can take | Numbers, codes, text, images, sounds… | Intuition (tacit knowledge), spoken word, written text, computer-based text, computer executable knowledge |
| Privacy issues | Significant, even if ‘anonymised’ | Not applicable |
| Intellectual property issues | Not at individual patient level | Significant |
| Scale of economic activity | Major global market in electronic patient records, etc. | Small, fragmented market in computable knowledge and decision support systems |
| Potential for clinical error | Exists, but implications usually modest | Large potential for safety issues resulting from incorrect or poorly implemented computable knowledge |